Close to the Margins

Shortly before leaving the UK for Uganda, significant areas of Britain experienced serious flooding. Thousands of householders found their homes inundated by floodwater, farmers’ crops were ruined, and we all woke up to the vulnerability of water and electricity supplies in the face of the forces of nature, even in the so-called developed world.

Arriving here in Uganda towards the end of the dry season, we were fully expecting to be basking in sunshine. Instead we were greeted by unseasonably heavy rain and thunderstorms, and discovered to our amazement that we needed to use our duvet to keep warm in bed at night. We’d really only included the duvet in our air freight (which, incidentally, all arrived intact) to provide packing for more vulnerable items of luggage.

In fact, apart from making some of the roads extremely muddy, the weather hasn’t been so bad here in the Arua district. But over the past few weeks much of Africa, including northern and eastern Uganda, has experienced its heaviest rain for a generation. The consequences have been devastating. Mud and wattle huts have collapsed in the face of the torrential waters making over 50,000 people homeless. Twenty-five districts have been cut off from the rest of the country, and the crops that haven’t been washed away are now rotting in gardens. More than 47 people have died and a state of emergency has been declared in the flooded regions.

The consequences of flooding in Britain are terrible for those involved, but when you live so close to the margins, as many do in Uganda, the consequences are so much worse; no clean water to drink (no bowsers here); the growing danger of water-borne diseases threatening the hungry and homeless; no insurance and no social security.

But the challenges go wider than that. In south west Congo there has been an outbreak of the deadly ebola virus. We are all hoping and praying that it will be contained and limited, but naturally there is deep anxiety in neighbouring south-east Uganda. Closer to home, following an outbreak earlier in the year, there has been a further outbreak of meningitis in the Arua district, a cause of great concern at the hospital here at Kuluva where there has been at least one fatality so far. Back in the UK, such an outbreak would be accompanied by the vaccination of vulnerable groups, but here, vaccination is not routinely available, even to student nurses working in the hospital.

In our living and our praying don’t let us forget the millions of people who constantly live their lives ‘close to the margins’.