8/13/2023 0 Comments Lost in the stormAccording to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, nearly 25 million people were forcibly displaced in 2019 due to natural disasters, compared to the approximately 8.6 million displaced by conflict and violence. The number of people who, like Kalson, will be forced to move due to extreme weather-related events are expected to be more frequent and will do so in higher numbers in the next decades. Sometimes we manage to find some short-term work to bring home a day’s wages.” Kalson and her 13 children now depend on well-wishers giving them “whatever change they have to spare.” “We haven’t been able to find the stable work I had been told about. “My relatives encouraged me to come to Bossaso – they told me that it was much more stable, and that it had a market centre where I could find work to feed my children,” she explains.Īfter five days of walking through harsh terrain – a perilous journey in which many are said to have died of starvation or mauled to death by wild animals – Kalson arrived in Bossaso’s Biyo Kulel informal settlement with her children. But six years ago, reeling from persistent water scarcity and inter-clan violence, Kalson had no choice but to leave. Originally from Kelafo, a rural town in the Somali region of Ethiopia, Kalson used to produce enough food from her small farm to feed her big family. Kalson, a 40-year-old Ethiopian and single mother of 13 children, knows too well what it means to depend on the weather to survive. People lost their livestock fishing and agriculture were disrupted, wells inundated, houses destroyed, and some 42,000 people displaced.įor many, this was not the first time they were being forced to flee their homes due to natural hazards, exacerbated by climate change. Just two weeks later, when aid agencies surveyed the damage, the scale of the disaster revealed widespread destruction of property and livelihoods. The tropical cyclone, equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane, was the strongest storm ever recorded in the northern Indian Ocean and wreaked unimaginable damage, dumping an incredible two years’ worth of rainfall in 72 hours. More than 60,000 people, many of them internally displaced and refugees, were affected when Cyclone Gati made landfall in the northeastern part of Somalia in November 2020 following two days of heavy rains.
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