Spare a thought for surviving workers

This is all that remains of Peacock Business Centre where 16 shops and their attendants who stayed in the backyard were swept away by Nyahode River in Chimanimani. - (Picture by Isdore Guvamombe) Inset: Ngangu Township which was affected by Cyclone Idai in Manicaland. — (Picture by Tawanda Mudimu) Isdore INCE time immemorial Nyahode River flew gently, over gleaming stones polished smooth by ages of running water. It never dried up on this stretch from Chimanimani to Chipinge.

Here, thickets of trees on the banks accompanied water further down until it emptied its contents into a swamp at its confluence with Rusitu.

Here banana cloves grew, the young ones systematically replacing the old and dead. Acre after acre of banana fields attracted settlement in the form of workers and villagers. So did avocados and other horticultural trinkets.

Day in day out scores of haulage trucks huffed and puffed, hobnobbing with loads of banana, avocado and other greens for the market yonder.

An intricate network of footpaths from various homesteads converged on the riverbanks like arms of an octopus. Suffice to say the river had over the years listened to many quarrels, between washing and bathing women, good and bad gossip, news and scandals.

It witnessed budding romances become marriages and weddings. It had seen many things but remained mum. It had seen many business centres built on its banks, with its water too. It had sustained the finished structures and communities.

It kept secrets. Vegetable gardens on its banks were another source of life. Besides the banana business, Kopa was a growth point, housing a police station, several agriculture extension workers, a clinic and its workers, shops, their attendants and owners.

But at the arrival of cyclone Idai, it burst its banks and washed away the life it had given and killed more people than any other river. It washed away villages, more than 30 shops and their attendants at Peacock and Kopa. At times entire families were washed away. In three instances families of four or five people were swept away and never found. Nyahode reversed everything it had given life and justified its existence for.

“I am from Mberengwa. I came here to work. I lost two children. I had three friends and their families who worked for Arex. One family had five people and they all died. Two others had four people each, parents and two children, each and they all died. No one was found.

“I am talking of my workmates-cumfriends. People I worked with on a daily basis. People close to me. People I shared everything with. And you want me to go back and work in the same area? Honestly?

“I survived because I had gone to Chipinge town for banking.

“Having worked for more than 12 years. I had become a businessman and I had two shops. One at Kopa and one at Peacock. I had a worker at each shop and each worker had a wife and a child, they were all swept away. They died. And, if you ask me, I don’t want anything to do with that place.

“I drink beer a lot these days to get some sleep. Otherwise I cannot sleep,’’ says Johnson Mhukutu.

Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister July Moyo acknowledges the Kopa Disaster.

“Behind the hill there is a settlement called Rusitu famous for growing horticulture, bananas and other foodstuffs. There people also come to assemble to trade and when we are analysing those who are missing some of the people who are missing are not necessarily from that area and also this has been worsened by the fact that some bodies were washed into Mozambique and the Mozambican villagers buried eight of those but before they buried them they took pictures,” he said.

In the matrix of Cyclone Idai in Chimanimani and Chipinge is a rare breed of people who might be forgotten in the hullabaloo of the aftermath of trying to fix things.

Chimanimani and Chipinge are not their homes. They went there to work. They provided the much needed labour force in hotels, clinics, in the multifarious array of Government departments, in schools and little everywhere else and they were caught in the line of duty.

In some cases they lost their loved ones, their workmates, their acquaintances and indeed their belongings.

While their colleagues died on the jaws of the cyclone they survived in the most difficult of all circumstances, not because they were clever but mainly because they were lucky.

“I am an agriculture teacher at Ngangu Secondary School. A day before the cyclone hit, I spent hours with my students in the garden and unbeknown to me I would lose 10 of them that night.

“I am so traumatised that I can no longer teach here. How do I go into the same class and face these students minus 10 of them? The memories are too hard for me.

“I only survived because I woke up to relieve myself around 9pm, only to find everything in the house shaking. I opened the door only to be hit by a mudslide. It is a miracle how I opened the other door and escaped with the mud following. I want to be transferred to a place where I will forget this disaster,’’ says, Brenda Sibanda.

“I even knew a house where some of my students who came from far away did boarding during the week and went home during weekends. It was wiped away and maybe only one survived. While schools are closed for now and am staying with my sister in Nyanyadzi, just the thought that one day I might go back to that school, makes me sick.

“I cannot imagine going back there. No. Never!”

She is not alone. Many professionals who survived the cyclone, immediately left the place as soon as they could but never got psychological support. They just left and indeed the Government should follow them up and give them support and counselling. It might sound too much to ask for transfers but it might save lives. Although the Government, through Local Government Minister July Moyo, has started organising counselling for the affected families, those who had gone to Chimanimni and Chipinge to work and might have left soon after the cyclone subsided need to be followed up and be given similar services.

The danger is that the concentration at the moment is on the people in situ, and yet a whole lot of workers left soon after surviving the cyclone and are in one town or another or in one village or the other.

Suffice to say that the counselling cannot be conclusive until everyone affected is given the support and the families of those workers who died in line of duty are also pacified.

Most of them certainly need to be transferred from that place if thay are to reorganise their lives.