Sierra Leone disaster hits close to home for many in city

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This article was published 30/08/2017 (2971 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the death toll from mudslides and flooding in Sierra Leone climbs to 1,000, one Winnipegger is coming to grips with losing most of her family in the latest disaster to hit the west African country.

Mahawa Conteh lost 14 members of her family in the capital Freetown when their homes were hit by the deluge coming down the mountain.

“When you hear that your loved ones, your family, all died the same day, that’s too much,” Conteh said between sobs Wednesday. The Winnipegger who came to Canada in 2012 is not alone in her grief.

On Friday night, members of the Sierra Leone Nationals Association of Manitoba are holding a vigil for Sierra Leone at Knox United Church downtown at 7 p.m. To association president Abu Bakarr Kamara, the disaster has been forgotten by the news media since it happened on Aug. 14. Their focus now is on tropical storm Harvey that, by Wednesday, had killed 30 people in Texas.

In Sierra Leone’s capital city, the government initially reported 450 dead and 600 missing. Now church and community leaders are saying the death toll is at 1,000 and an estimated 3,000 people are homeless. There’s no insurance or anything that comes close to the Americans’ Federal Emergency Management Agency helping people in the storm-hit Gulf Coast region, said Kamara in Winnipeg. The association is holding the vigil, a fundraising car wash on Sept. 9 and asking Manitobans to donate to charities helping people in Sierra Leone.

“People need us to help,” said Kamara, who is sending money to his sister and her family who lost their home in the mudslide and are staying with cousins. He said desperate strangers who lost everything in the disaster are on Facebook reaching out to Sierra Leonese Canadians for help.

“Not everyone has relatives in Canada.”

It’s not the first time this community in Manitoba has rallied to pray for their former home and to support local people dealing with shock and grief. Two years ago, Sierra Leone was hit by the deadly Ebola outbreak. It saw 13,500 cases of the grisly virus that killed close to 4,000 people.

Now, in the aftermath of Ebola, people with loved one in Sierra Leone like Mahawa Conteh are grieving again.

The mudslides killed her uncles, their wives and children in Freetown in a horrific manner, she said.

“It was the way they died,” said Conteh, who has two preschool-age children. She’s most haunted by the image of her pregnant aunt who was due to give birth this month. “When they find her body, the legs were gone,” said the mom who tries to wait for her husband to get home from work and take the kids so she can cry without them seeing her so upset. “Kids always want to see their parents happy.”

Conteh said her Freetown relatives who weren’t home at the time of the mudslide all survived but are now homeless and destitute.

“They don’t know where their house is,” she said. “Everything was wiped out. The place looked like a field.”

She works part-time and is looking for more hours so she can send more money to help them. “It’s so stressful. It’s too much.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca