Eyewitness report from Sierra Leone landslide

Gisele Henriques

CAFOD worker, Gisele Henriques, was visiting Sierra Leone when the terrible landslide, which has claimed hundreds of lives, occurred and saw the rains that led to the disaster.

A humanitarian worker, Gisele works for CAFOD, where she supports communities create sustainable ways of making a living. Despite many years living in West Africa this was her first trip to Sierra Leone, which she was visiting to train local staff.

As the name Sierra Leone - ‘Lion Mountains’ in Portuguese - suggests, the area around the capital Freetown is mountainous. The lush and green hills are peppered with homes, made way for by deforestation, and the heavy downpours that occur in the rainy season are not unexpected. What was not anticipated, however, was three times the usual seasonal rainfall. This made for conditions ripe for landslides, something Gisele could relate to from growing up in her native Brazil.

“Freetown is extremely hilly and I’m originally from Rio de Janeiro, which is also very undulating. In Rio you also have the slums on the hills and whenever there are rains like that, the same thing happens; there is loss of life and it’s the people in the slums that lose everything, because they are the most vulnerable.”

The torrential downpours on Sunday night stood out to Gisele before she even knew about the landslide:

“I remember sleeping that night and the rain just pounded down, all night, water gushing past in the gullies that go down the hills. It was as if the Colorado River was next to my room. In the morning there was flooding and I had to ask someone to drive me to the office because, even though it was only a five minute walk, I wouldn’t have been able to get there otherwise.”

Different charities started co-ordinating their response very quickly after news of the landslide came through and soon the scale of the disaster, which has claimed at least 500 lives, became clear.

“Photographs of the aftermath kept coming in, horrendous photographs of bodies caked in mud. There was a lot of pain and you could see that people were shocked and saddened by the situation. In the office colleagues were nervous as they couldn’t tell who was or wasn’t affected by it.”

Gisele returned home to London a couple of days following the floods and the CAFOD team in Sierra Leone are now working as quickly as possible to support those effected. Working with local partners, CAFOD is distributing food and water to affected families and also helping prevent the spread of disease by providing health and sanitation support.

For Gisele, it is important that lessons are learnt from the disaster last week so that others do not have to suffer such loss:

“Events like this reinforce the importance of creating resilience through our work, so we can support communities in preparing for disasters, in responding to and in bouncing back from them, with a long-term development outlook. It’s critical.”

To find out more about CAFOD’s work in Sierra Leone in response to the landslide, please visit www.cafod.org.uk/News/Emergencies-news/Landslides-Sierra-Leone