At around 6pm local time on Monday, March 1, a torrent of mud and huge boulders hurtled down the slopes of Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano in the Bududa district of eastern Uganda.
The mudslides wiped out an entire village including a health centre and a church where people had gathered to pray. Children sheltering in a village shop from the heavy rain were all killed when a river of thick mud buried the building.
ShelterBox Response Team (SRT) members Stuart Oates (UK) and Laura Dale (UK) were sent to the disaster hit region and distributed aid for up to 2,000 people.
Standing on the site of the mudslides it was difficult to take in the scale of the disaster. A few mud-beaten shacks were perched lopsided on the edge of the slopes having narrowly missed the avalanche of mud which swept away neighbouring houses.
Metal rods from a hospital bed poked out from underneath a boulder. Household rubble and pieces of clothing were littered about the muddy slope - including a child’s red shoe.
The bright morning sunshine lit up the horrors of the last few weeks as villagers from neighbouring mountain communities helped the army dig for bodies using hoes and spades. Unable to get heavy machinery up the mountain - it is an hour and a half walk and a 15 minute drive from the nearest road passable by truck - soldiers hike up the mountain everyday burdened by the task of searching for buried villagers.
So far 97 bodies have been recovered from the mud with up to 400 people feared missing. One man from the village, his eyes sunken and his hands clasped in prayer, had lost every member of his family and not one body had been found. Another mudslide victim was unidentifiable so villagers buried him near where he was found.
Up to 5,000 people have been displaced with roughly 3,500 based at an internally displaced person’s camp some distance from the mudslides at Bulucheke. More than 1,800 of them are children.
Despite the lingering danger of more heavy rain and mudslides, some villagers chose to stay on the mountain, reluctant to leave their animals or their land.
I had less than 24 hours to finish work, research the mudslides in Uganda and do some last minute kit shopping before the deployment. I tipped everything out over the living room floor and started to pack, remembering things that had come in useful during training like Gaffa tape, which we used to bind Marie’s feet when she had crippling blisters!
I became a SRT member in November and Uganda was my first deployment. With SRT trainer David Eby’s (US) mantra ringing in my head - eat when you can, sleep when you can and manage your down time - I began the journey to Entebbe airport, Uganda, with fellow response team member Stuart Oates from Cornwall, UK.
Stepping out into 30 degree sunshine we were met by Fred Kusolo Walimbwa - the programme manager for the Child Development Fund in Mbale, who had got in touch with ShelterBox and asked for their help. After 32 hours of travelling - sometimes on the wrong side of the road through Kampala’s grid-locked traffic - we found a place to stay and got some rest.
The following morning we headed for the camp. Local women, some already very traumatised, told us they didn’t have enough aid and their children were getting sick. The Uganda Red Cross Society had been working very hard at the camp but the reality was they hadn’t dealt with a disaster on this kind of scale before.
After our assessment and discussions with other NGOs also providing aid, we called ShelterBox HQ with our ‘wish list’. Days of battling with bureaucracy and red tape followed, underlining the importance of sending out SRTs with the aid; without them it just wouldn’t get there. Luckily Uganda Red Cross agreed to act as a consignee for the aid and the secretary general wrote us a letter to hurry along the progress of the aid through customs.
200 ShelterBoxes, hundreds of hoes, stoves and other tools and 12 Classrooms in Box along arrived at Entebbe Airport a week after our first visit to the camp. We had to overcome huge challenges to get the boxes through customs and transported to the camp but with help from the Red Cross and our Ugandan driver, Hassan, we organised transport to the camp, eager to begin distribution.
Heavy rain had turned the camp into a mud-pit and the population had increased putting more strain on the already inadequate resources. The Red Cross had put together a list of the most affected households - women with four or five children under the age of five and families with expectant mothers - ready for distribution.
We began training camp volunteers how to put up the tents, use the stoves and other equipment. Green domes started to pop up all over the camp as our efforts finally began to pay off.
Families were allocated a tent and immediately set about making it a home, digging the land at the front and putting stones down to create a patio. Stoves were burning out the front of the tents and the camp suddenly had something it had been lacking - a sense of community.
Seeing families move into ShelterBox tents filled me with a pride I’ve not felt before. Not of personal achievement or altruistic gain, but of being part of a charity where the difference they make is tangible. Many of the families had lost loved ones and some of them had lost their homes and belongings.
In these desperate times, it felt good to be able to do something, however small, to help.
Watching the villagers carefully disturb the rubble which lay under the surface of the mud, the reality of the situation began to sink in. Underneath my feet, below this river of mud, there were potentially hundreds of villagers - mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children - who literally drowned on their own land.
It was an emotional experience and one which I find difficult to explain - the photographs fail to capture the scale of the disaster and fall woefully short of expressing the pain and suffering of the villagers who have lost everything.
But the experience did bring home the importance of responding to disasters and the work that ShelterBox does.
As we left for the safety of our own homes we were informed that a new 5km crack had appeared in Mount Elgon in the Munafwa district prompting fears of yet more mudslides in this beautiful African country.
The mudslides wiped out an entire village including a health centre and a church where people had gathered to pray. Children sheltering in a village shop from the heavy rain were all killed when a river of thick mud buried the building.
ShelterBox Response Team (SRT) members Stuart Oates (UK) and Laura Dale (UK) were sent to the disaster hit region and distributed aid for up to 2,000 people.
Standing on the site of the mudslides it was difficult to take in the scale of the disaster. A few mud-beaten shacks were perched lopsided on the edge of the slopes having narrowly missed the avalanche of mud which swept away neighbouring houses.
Metal rods from a hospital bed poked out from underneath a boulder. Household rubble and pieces of clothing were littered about the muddy slope - including a child’s red shoe.
The bright morning sunshine lit up the horrors of the last few weeks as villagers from neighbouring mountain communities helped the army dig for bodies using hoes and spades. Unable to get heavy machinery up the mountain - it is an hour and a half walk and a 15 minute drive from the nearest road passable by truck - soldiers hike up the mountain everyday burdened by the task of searching for buried villagers.
So far 97 bodies have been recovered from the mud with up to 400 people feared missing. One man from the village, his eyes sunken and his hands clasped in prayer, had lost every member of his family and not one body had been found. Another mudslide victim was unidentifiable so villagers buried him near where he was found.
Up to 5,000 people have been displaced with roughly 3,500 based at an internally displaced person’s camp some distance from the mudslides at Bulucheke. More than 1,800 of them are children.
Despite the lingering danger of more heavy rain and mudslides, some villagers chose to stay on the mountain, reluctant to leave their animals or their land.
I had less than 24 hours to finish work, research the mudslides in Uganda and do some last minute kit shopping before the deployment. I tipped everything out over the living room floor and started to pack, remembering things that had come in useful during training like Gaffa tape, which we used to bind Marie’s feet when she had crippling blisters!
I became a SRT member in November and Uganda was my first deployment. With SRT trainer David Eby’s (US) mantra ringing in my head - eat when you can, sleep when you can and manage your down time - I began the journey to Entebbe airport, Uganda, with fellow response team member Stuart Oates from Cornwall, UK.
Stepping out into 30 degree sunshine we were met by Fred Kusolo Walimbwa - the programme manager for the Child Development Fund in Mbale, who had got in touch with ShelterBox and asked for their help. After 32 hours of travelling - sometimes on the wrong side of the road through Kampala’s grid-locked traffic - we found a place to stay and got some rest.
The following morning we headed for the camp. Local women, some already very traumatised, told us they didn’t have enough aid and their children were getting sick. The Uganda Red Cross Society had been working very hard at the camp but the reality was they hadn’t dealt with a disaster on this kind of scale before.
After our assessment and discussions with other NGOs also providing aid, we called ShelterBox HQ with our ‘wish list’. Days of battling with bureaucracy and red tape followed, underlining the importance of sending out SRTs with the aid; without them it just wouldn’t get there. Luckily Uganda Red Cross agreed to act as a consignee for the aid and the secretary general wrote us a letter to hurry along the progress of the aid through customs.
200 ShelterBoxes, hundreds of hoes, stoves and other tools and 12 Classrooms in Box along arrived at Entebbe Airport a week after our first visit to the camp. We had to overcome huge challenges to get the boxes through customs and transported to the camp but with help from the Red Cross and our Ugandan driver, Hassan, we organised transport to the camp, eager to begin distribution.
Heavy rain had turned the camp into a mud-pit and the population had increased putting more strain on the already inadequate resources. The Red Cross had put together a list of the most affected households - women with four or five children under the age of five and families with expectant mothers - ready for distribution.
We began training camp volunteers how to put up the tents, use the stoves and other equipment. Green domes started to pop up all over the camp as our efforts finally began to pay off.
Families were allocated a tent and immediately set about making it a home, digging the land at the front and putting stones down to create a patio. Stoves were burning out the front of the tents and the camp suddenly had something it had been lacking - a sense of community.
Seeing families move into ShelterBox tents filled me with a pride I’ve not felt before. Not of personal achievement or altruistic gain, but of being part of a charity where the difference they make is tangible. Many of the families had lost loved ones and some of them had lost their homes and belongings.
In these desperate times, it felt good to be able to do something, however small, to help.
Watching the villagers carefully disturb the rubble which lay under the surface of the mud, the reality of the situation began to sink in. Underneath my feet, below this river of mud, there were potentially hundreds of villagers - mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children - who literally drowned on their own land.
It was an emotional experience and one which I find difficult to explain - the photographs fail to capture the scale of the disaster and fall woefully short of expressing the pain and suffering of the villagers who have lost everything.
But the experience did bring home the importance of responding to disasters and the work that ShelterBox does.
As we left for the safety of our own homes we were informed that a new 5km crack had appeared in Mount Elgon in the Munafwa district prompting fears of yet more mudslides in this beautiful African country.
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