by Lindsay Redifer
Marielene, a rice farmer in northeastern Madagascar, sits with her daughter in the school where she took shelter after Cyclone Indlala destroyed her home. (©2006 Lindsay Redifer/CARE)
"The water came in so quickly," Marielene recalls. "It destroyed my house." Immediately after the latest cyclone, many villagers fled to the school for shelter. Now only Marielene, her 5-year-old daughter Zafy and a neighbor remain.
Indlala hit on March 15 and worked its way across the island. An estimated 90 percent of the villages near the northeastern town of Maraonsetra were flooded, and the now-stagnant water will take a long time to recede.
The Maroantetra area lost almost 19,000 acres of planted rice. The storm destroyed 20 percent of rain-fed rice and about 80 percent of irrigated rice fields. Since rice is the staple food in Madagascar, a serious food crisis is underway, affecting more than 175,000 people. Estimates of national losses will not be available until the harvest begins in May, but the government forecasts that the country will need to import twice as much rice in the coming year.
Food relief distributed by CARE is expected to last each person until the next harvest in October. CARE is bringing Marielene and others in Ivato emergency supplies of rice, peas and vegetable oil.
Food distribution is slow, tedious work. None of the flooded villages can be reached by road. For CARE, small motorboats are the best way to transport food, but the boats can only carry so much. That means only one or two villages a day will get the supplies they need to tide them over until the next harvest. Several preliminary visits have to happen first and everything said or done needs to be recorded.
"I'm very happy to have CARE here," Marielene says. "They helped us today." But no one knows how many rice farmers, most of whom are women, will be able to plant new crops on schedule next month.
Marielene and the people of Ivato used to live along a low riverbank, and they planted their fields just across from their homes. Now the original Ivato is abandoned. Empty, broken houses wobble on stilts that hold them just above the newly swollen river. Once-fertile fields are covered in water. The village has moved up to a higher part of the bank and most of the people have managed to build new houses. But even there the mud is ankle-deep. Farmers like Marielene don't know what they'll do if the waters don't recede quickly enough to permit planting new crops.
Marielene's neighbor, Angeline, is a 50-year-old mother of six and also a rice farmer. She's salvaged a large basket of rice from the flooded field. It appears normal, but she knows much of it will have to be thrown out. "I'll have to sort through this to find what's good and what's bad," she says. She explains that if a raw kernel of rice absorbs enough water it spoils and can sicken a person who eats it.
Down the river from Ivato sits a village called Rantavobe, where Marie Licia used to have her home. A 40-year-old rice farmer and single mother of one, Marie Licia now lives in her mother's house, right next door to what remains of her own.
"I'm very unhealthy," she sighs. "I have no energy left." Marie Licia says she lost all her rice and can't say when she'll be able to plant a new crop. She's been to a doctor but can't afford the prescribed medicine. She tries to rest and take it easy, but she has a baby boy to raise and can only sleep so much.
Marie Licia says she's been exhausted ever since she barely survived the cold, contaminated flood waters that destroyed her home. "I was sitting with my younger sister. A river of water rushed past the house. Then it all started coming in and we had to jump out," she says.
Her house is now a naked, twisted frame filled with broken wood from the walls and shredded raffia that had been the roof. Deep, shoe-sucking mud covers the front yard.
Emergency response and relief resources are stretched thin after the cumulative effects of six cyclones and a previous food crisis in the south. CARE is working around the clock with the government of Madagascar to respond to urgent need, but without increased international attention to the crisis, tens of thousands of people may face an increasingly dire emergency.
Lindsay Redifer is a Peace Corps worker who is assisting CARE during the emergencies in Madagascar.
