Dreaming of Home After the Floods in Ghana

By Lane Hartill

Zangba Zipunay's bad luck started in November 2006.

Fellow farmers were burning their fields during the harmattan, when the temperature drops and a dry wind howls down from the Sahel. A stray ember rode an updraft and landed gently on his house. No one noticed. When the flames licked through the rafters and ate their way into his bedroom, it was too late.

He pulls out photos showing charred millet and well-cooked clothing. The fire burnt his house black as a briquette.

On a low plot of land next to his brother's house, Zangba started over. He paid a carpenter to build the frames of two bedrooms. He kept the food hot and local beer flowing as community members showed up to slap mud onto his new walls. For his wife Banong and the four grandchildren who live with them, it wasn't a glass-and-steel dream home. It was dried mud; it was the best Zangba could do.

When the rains came in July and August of 2007, turning his compound into a wading pool and killing two goats, he knew it wasn't a good sign. He cut holes in his compound walls to let the water flow out. But instead it rushed in, bathing the foundation in standing water. Banong's room fell first. Two walls of Zangba's room went next. The others were so badly buckled they threatened to go at any moment. He cut his losses and accepted his fate. But he admits the warm water that soaked into his grain sacks, turning his food soggy and fermented, stung deep.

Zangba and Banong moved in with his brother . In America, they say fish and guests stink after three days. Not in Africa. Banong sleeps on a mat on the dirt floor on one side of a room divided by a curtain; her 16-year-old nephew, Richard, is on the other. Zangba sleeps outside on the porch on a cowhide rug in the dirt. His machetes are propped up in the corner next to a wad of sour clothes.

The couple is forced to sponge food off their in-laws. But as guests, they would never think of asking what's for dinner, because many nights, there is none. Zangba's brother lost crops too. Some nights, everyone drifts to sleep, trying to ignore the sound of their grumbling stomachs.

A Growing Dread

As the floodwaters recede across West Africa, they're replaced by a growing dread as the dry season looms. Zangba is just one of more than 600,000 people across the region affected by the intense rains from July to September. Now, houses must be rebuilt, school fees paid, and livestock sold to buy food during the lean season. CRS is stepping up its response in four West African countries to soften the blow the floods dealt to families.

In Burkina Faso, CRS is organizing six "voucher fairs." Burkinabé hit by the floods will receive $50 to buy items such as doors and windows, cement, mosquito nets, soap, flashlights, corn, rice, bread, and oil. The floods affected more than 92,000 people in the country. The U.S. Embassy in Burkina Faso contributed $50,000 to CRS while the CRS-Caritas consortium provided more than $42,000.

In Mali, more than 42,000 people were affected by the floods. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded CRS $50,000. CRS contributed more than $19,000 in private resources. The money is now being used to distribute food to displaced families. It will also be used to rehabilitate schools, clean school latrines and provide school supplies.

In Niger, close to 60,000 people have been affected by flooding. CRS plans to assist close to 4,000 flood-affected households in three regions by distributing hygiene kits (soap, water filters, and water disinfectant), blankets, cups, bowls, pots, and cooking spoons.

In Ghana, thanks to a $50,000 donation from USAID, CRS distributed supplies to 3,000 Ghanaians hit hardest by the floods. The funding provided lanterns, blankets, sleeping mats and, in some regions, insecticide-treated mosquito nets. CRS also contributed $20,000 of its private resources to buy corn for those affected.

Ghana is the hardest-hit country, with about 35,000 homes destroyed. Many of these were made of mud, traditionally small and circular, and less prone to collapse. Farmers mix together cow dung and fruit from a local tree to form the plaster for outside walls, improving durability. But the practice has faded in recent years.

After talking with families in Ghana's Upper East region, CRS is preparing to help those whose homes were damaged. CRS plans to use local labor and materials to improve the stability of homes if more severe weather hits.

During the floods, some people stayed in schools or churches, but the majority of the people, like Zangba, pulled what they could from the mud and headed to neighbors and family. Bedrooms were vacated for family members. Children slept in toolsheds, wedged together like crayons. In at least one compound, a mother was forced to sleep in the grain silo.

Dreaming of Home

One morning when I visit, Zangba is lying on a mat, staring at the ceiling, cooling himself with a woven fan as fat black insects dive-bomb him. I ask him what he is thinking.

"I'm always lying down, imagining when I will have my own house to sleep in again."

It's a thought that plagues him daily. Now that his father has died and he's the oldest, Zangba is in charge of deciding dowries and other family matters. When problems come up, siblings look to him. But with his wife muttering that he should have known better than to build where he did and his two adult children ignoring his messages asking them to collect their kids (they've been with him three years), he's a man beaten down.

His strength to farm isn't there, he says. He's not a young man anymore. The slabs of muscle that came from turning soil in the sun as a teenager have given way to rolling pin limbs covered in folds of loose, dusty skin. Like many elderly in rural Ghana, he's not sure how old he is. He married before the British left Ghana in 1957, he says. Then, in the middle of a sentence, he's hit by a hacking jag. He barks out raw, gravelly coughs. He has a hard time shaking it.

He walks through a patch of sorghum to his collapsed house. He sports a plaid blazer that once wrapped the back of a smaller, richer man. When he walks, he has a dignified air, with his hands clasped behind his back, perpetually in a state of contemplation.

When he reaches his former home, the only sign of life is a flea-chewed female dog, panting in the shade. He doesn't have the money to rebuild, he says. In fact, he just spent his last 20 cents on cola nuts — which suppress hunger — and some corn ground. As he watches a carpenter tiptoe across the roof in his flip-flops, he wonders how he will pay him. He's hired him to pull the zinc off the roof. The goats are jumping on it, denting it. He needs it to rebuild, whenever that might be.

He can't ask his brother for help. He's already done so much for him. When they were younger, they farmed and hunted rabbits and grass cutter - a kind of bush rat — together. Whenever Zangba asked him to do something, he did it. And like any good older brother, he looked after him. Now the tables are turned, and Zangba isn't used to it.

At times like these, Zangba's father's words ring in his ears. Before he died he told him to "take care of himself, and his wife, and his children." For now, that's proving difficult. But then CRS showed up. They cared enough to seek him out, ask him questions. That gives Zangba hope.

"The people in Ghana, the foreigners, the well-to-do big men in America, they didn't come here," he says. "[CRS] came. You're a godsend."

Lane Hartill is the West Africa regional information officer for Catholic Relief Services. He has visited CRS programs in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Lane is based in Dakar, Senegal.