{UAH} Nature punishes residents for rape of its virginity in Bududa
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Nature punishes residents for rape of its virginity in Bududa
Women mourn four-year-old John Bosco Wandebe in Bududa District yesterday. He died after landslides on Saturday swept the family's house. PHOTO BY STEPHEN WANDERA
Posted Monday, August 12 2013 at 01:00
This was a hugely destructive lashing by Mother Nature, seemingly determined to punish residents for defiling its virgin vegetation cover by opening it up as gardens.
Yesterday, the first full day after Saturday's mudslide combined with hailstorms, farmers counted unspeakable losses with a frightening stare of famine. Several gardens were either washed downstream or buried under mud slide.
The hailstones tore foliage, including banana and cassava leaves, into miserable shreds. Flash floods erode the dirt road into tiny streams of a jagged stretch.
Excited young children nevertheless endured the falling rains to pick loads of hailstones home.
The loosened top soil slid under the boots and curious residents trekking to the scene of the weekend mudslide fell and rose as rain battered them. It was a bravery test, and our clothes soaked in the generous downpour lasting more than an hour.
Rivers fury
The murky waters of River Manafwa, which at the weekend burst its banks with devastating fury and the uphill communities of Shiteka and Nekesa to its east, thundered in the rocky gorge.
A eucalyptus tree-deck pedestrian overpass on the valley swayed under the light weight of two children, forcing frightened adults to seek alternative crossing within Bushiyi Sub-county.
Sharp-edged pebbles exposed by run-off water scared like dreaded Satan's fangs and projected as if on emergency call to puncture car and motorcycle tyres or even cut the sole of bare-foot pedestrians.
The motorists could only drive up to 3km, and attempting to edge closer to the mudslide scene in a vehicle was akin to skirting with death.
This is Bududa, the land of rich soils that seduce ambitious cultivators to their grave with a reward of bountiful yields.
In March 2010, a mudslide in Nametsi Parish here buried an estimated 350 people alive.
And since then, the avalanche has been regularly drifting down and knocking a few houses, much of the minor tragedies largely unreported.
The government's sweetener of opening up a resettlement camp in the relatively flat Kiryadongo District in Bunyoro sub-region to persuade residents at high risk on Mt Elgon slopes to leave failed spectacularly.
Several men and women trucked there in the first batch returned home, citing hardships of land and food shortage that strangled their agricultural enterprise.
Oddly, many say they would rather die tilling their fertile soils where their ancestors are buried. Some observers call this sturdy cultural attachment, moreover to the dead, a limitless primitive expression.
But the volcanic soils are highly yielding that any seed scattered anywhere on Mt Elgon slopes virtually blooms to plentiful harvest.
That is the poisoned chalice: abandon the gardens and live like a pauper on humanitarian hand-out or die digging up for high returns.
It is not only the gardens, it seems, gifted with abundance. Fertility rates here are up the ladder as well with the number of children sired by a couple averaging nine.
Beatrice Nandutu is a housewife, and at 30, has already given birth to eight children - all of who unfortunately are admitted to Bududa Hospital with injuries sustained when their mud-and-wattle house collapsed on them during the Saturday mudslide.
Destruction
The population burst has meant destruction of hillside vegetation, which otherwise would retain the soils in periods of generous rainfall, for farmland.
There is the unending fights with environmentalists, with wildlife conservationists complaining of encroachment on Mt Elgon National Park.
For now, much of the slopes are bare and money-makers are instead felling trees unrestricted with power saws!
It all seems like a rehearsal for mass suicide.
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