Woman attempts to keep house in flood
and banana have all been destroyed. The view from Route 1—the country’s national road linking north and south and the only road still standing in the province—resembled a vast sea drowning the fertile promises of the countryside. The only signs of life on either side of the road were melaleuca trees which stood proudly against the flood.
In the face of hardship, the people on the roadside we passed in Dong Thap province seemed to have adjusted to temporary life as refugees by carrying on with their business. A community of tents was abuzz with a designated clinic, café, and a hodgepodge of markets. As we moved deeper into the remote villages of Phu Duc and Phu Hiep—Oxfam-supported melaleuca project areas—in Tam Nong district, the scene changed drastically. The flood had reached this area less than four months ago and will not subside until early December. From our boat we could see long stretches of floodwater lined with earthen dykes. On top of them were the same tents we had seen many times in earlier visits. Similar to flood victims in Long An, the villages we visited were remote and isolated. The people there are getting by on a day-to-day basis with sporadic help from aid agencies.
When we arrived, the women in Phu Duc village came to the village people’s committee to fetch a white, plastic water container donated by the Vietnam Red Cross. These containers included water purification tablets. One woman commented, “This is our second donation of water tablets since the floods began. When we first received them, we were not sure how to use them. Some of us had stomach problems, because we used too many tablets for too little water.” A second woman spoke about the drowning death of her friend, a wife and mother of four children. At this point, these laments were all too familiar. They were all too tragic.
Oxfam’s partner organization, Can Tho University, has been deeply involved in bringing relief to victims of the floods. The university made it mandatory for each staff member to donate 2 days of their salary twice during the flood. Thereafter, donations from staff have been on a voluntary basis. The College of Technology alone raised 170 million dong, and they sent their dean, and the vice-rector of CTU, Dr. Le Quang Minh, to distribute the aid directly to flood victims. In one of his trips to hand out relief supplies, his boat capsized. Fortunately, no one on the delegation was hurt. The unwavering commitment of CTU staff to the communities they served was inspiring.
With representatives from villages in the Plain of Reeds, CTU, and OA staff, we proceeded to map out immediate relief needs that Oxfam could support. Immediate needs identified for all three provinces included small boats, fishing gear, and water purification systems. Long An was the only province that asked for rice rations because victims there face continued hunger.
All communities have lost houses, roads, bridges, dykes, schools, clinics, productive inputs (e.g. seeds, rice varieties, etc.), fruit orchards, and household goods. The indicative costs associated with these losses were only a fraction of the overall net loss in 54 districts and towns of the Mekong delta, estimated at US$200 million. In a review of major floods of the past forty years, occurring in 1961, 1978, 1996, and 2000, CTU concluded that the time interval of these major floods would only get shorter. Plans are to focus on long-term solutions and investments for the region. They propose programs to develop flood-resistant residential clusters. A successful example of this model can be found in An Giang province, where residents resettled to one location with a government subsidy of US$400 per household to build raised houses with strong, cement poles. As a result, this province has experienced only minor damages from this year’s flood. Other proposals included a livelihood improvement program for the flood prone areas, safeguard measures for fruit orchards in the moderately flooded areas, and hospital boats with the capability to reach remote villages during a natural disaster.
While Oxfam America alone can not shoulder these costs, participants pointed out that we could leverage funding from other sources. The costs will be staggering. Meanwhile, as we left the university, heavy rain continued. I thought again about the flood refugees camped on the earthen dykes and the roadside with scanty cover from the rain. They will be enduring great misery for the next month and a half until the flood water recedes. And life will only become more difficult as reconstruction begins and they return to the nothingness of what used to be their homes.[Nov 1, 2000]