The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Features Correspondent
FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Peter Moyo’s eyes light up when he describes the stream in Mahlaba, Tsholotsho that runs near his family homestead.
“It’s not straight but it twists likes this,” he said, bending his elbow as if to show how, like the veins in his arms, the stream’s gushing waters ran through the remote patch of land in Tsholotsho where his family had found a place to call home years before he was even born.
On most months of the year the stream runs harmlessly by, with its surrounding banks tinged with lush green vegetation around which the children from Peter’s village while away the hours of the day before the sun hides its fiery face behind the western horizon.
This year in January, however, Peter, who lives with his mother, father and two younger sisters, got a rude introduction to how this beauty that lives next door could, with the right weather conditions, transform into a beast.
“We had been getting a lot of rain before Christmas so we didn’t think that anything was wrong. We weren’t worried,” he said.
The clouds as they went to bed on that fateful January day had been ominous and what had merely been a dark smudge on the sky when Peter made his way from Sipepa Secondary School suddenly transformed into a bigger, darker stain that ran across the sky.
When the rain came, the famous bend which Peter adores was, for the most part, the cause of their troubles. Instead of allowing the free flow of water downstream, the bend had chocked the stream leading to some of the water spilling towards the homesteads.
At first the water seeping under Peter’s bedroom had been nothing more than spittle, but as the night progressed it became clear that danger was imminent, as it soaked his blankets and eventually flooded his room.
“I can swim but I was afraid. The whole place was full of water. But the helicopters came and took us,” he said.
Two months from that terrifying encounter with the full might of nature, Peter is now in higher spirits. When the Sunday News crew visited Sipepa camp on Monday last week, it did not take long for Peter and his friends to surround the crew’s truck. The appearance of visitors usually means donations and for Peter and his friend, gangly 16-year-old Khulekani Nkiwane, this is always cause for celebration.
With schools closed and holiday lessons only available for Ordinary Level pupils at Sipepa High School, the boys have had to look for ways to entertain themselves in a camp where sometimes life seems to move at a snail’s pace.
“We usually just read our books,” said Khulekani before the mischievous giggles from the boys that had gathered around him forced him to revise this claim. “We play soccer on the field near here. There is nothing else to do for us,” he said.
While Khulekani and Peter seem always upbeat, it is not always the same for all the boys that have for two months called Sipepa Transit Centre home. One boy only identified as Ntando, who the boys have found an easy victims for their jokes, has a permanent scowl on his face that the boys have found as easy fodder for their jests. Another, the only one not from Mahlaba, barely utters a word, to the boys’ amusement.
“We don’t know where he came from. We don’t know his name. He told us he is from Maphili. When he sees us playing he just comes over and joins us and so when he saw us by your truck that is also what he did. He doesn’t want to say anything,” said the jovial Khulekani.
While the unknown outcast’s silence might be odd to the boys, it might be a normal reaction for a child that has recently suffered loss. Studies have shown that post-disaster trauma is common in children after calamities like floods or earthquakes.
This is especially so if the children have suffered loss through either the destruction of family property, the death of loved ones or displacement from homes.
In a study after the devastating Hurricane Katrina, Betty Lai, an Assistant of Public Health at Georgia State Universities concluded that “it is very common for children to report symptoms of post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety after a disaster. These symptoms might look like nightmares or flashbacks to the disaster, avoiding reminders of the event or being more worried about events in general. Children may also have trouble in school or be more sedentary.”
The floods that wreaked such sudden ruin on communities in Mahlosi, Mahlaba, Thamuhla, Mbamba, Mele, Lutshome, Maphili and Mbanyana were not on Katrina’s scale but they have also meant that boys also have to assume responsibilities that they did not have before January’s deluge.
The camp is populated mostly by women, who spend most of their days sheltering from the sun’s intense rays in their tents, and children who scamper and play about. Men are nowhere to be seen.
“They take care of the cattle back home. They come here once in a while to drop in and see what’s happening and then they return to look after the homes and cattle. We’re the men here now,” said Peter with hint of childish pride.
The feeling that they are at the cusp of manhood has been heightened by the fact that the boys have recently been circumcised. As the chatter increased among the boys, it attracted the attention of camp administrator Ms Nontobeko Ndlovu who came to ask why some of the boys in the O-level class had still not gone back to class.
Suddenly their lips hid their teeth and the smiles disappeared from their faces only to be replaced by grimaces of pain as they claimed that they were still healing from the circumcision procedures.
“They’re lying. It has been weeks since they were circumcised and I wonder how long this recovery of theirs will take. Give them a ball right now and you will see how active they really are,” said Ms Ndlovu.
While Peter is always upbeat, the frantic scenes from their rescue have still not left his mind. On the outside he projects a tough and jovial exterior, but further questions about their rescue from a flood-prone Mahlaba seems to pry open the scabs that had only recently started to heal in his mind.
“The water was too much. They have to move us from there. They have to find a new place for us. What if the water returns again?” he asked with a hint of pain in his voice.
Most of the children at Sipepa Camp were born before the last great flood in 2001. The boys search each other’s faces for answers when asked about their knowledge of that calamity. To them it is merely a story that is relayed to them by their elders; a nightmare out of a twisted folktale that they never thought would visit them. Khulekani, meanwhile has a solution to Mahlaba’s flood problem.
“They need to build cement houses for us. The mud houses just fell apart. The houses made of cement were left standing and that is what we also want as well,” he said, before shooting down a suggestion by another boy that walls should be built around their homes.
Peter’s solution seems the more likely, however. On the road to Sipepa Transit Camp, the Sunday News crew met officers from the Civil Protection Unit officers who had just been to the new sight where new stands are expected to be allocated. The officers said that they had finished pegging stands to be allocated to people, and Government has said it will assist in the building of new homes, starting off with construction of toilets as people are eager to move out of the camp. For the boys at Sipepa with their lives still in limbo and some of the joys of childhood suspended, life after the disaster, although not devoid of its little moments of happiness, is still very grim.
