Imtiaz Sooliman – Gift of the Givers helps KZN communities

Gift of the givers. Organization also on the ground to help

communities in KZN we left destitute by the floods. 253

people are said to have died in teguini alone. The 1000s more have

now been left destitute. The exact numbers are not yet known. Let's

find out more from the organisation's founder, Doctor MTS

suloman. Doctor suloman, good afternoon. Thank you very much for

your time. What about are you and what are you seeing on the ground?

I know that you started trying to focus on assisting from yesterday.

What is the initial assessment you've made?

Good afternoon, Dan, we've we've covered many areas already. We

started. With Dan Peter mattersburg, Hillcrest, Brendan

Hill new Germany, fine town, Tonga, predom, Phoenix. We've

covered Abu parts of Easter, pinglow,

amlazi inanda and many other central Devon. Our team started

off yesterday morning. They got a call at 5am and this the person

who called them said, remember, you were here last week on the

fourth of April. We went from Igbo heights Tonga. And the story that

was carried by everyone, the granny who got who got washed away

with his three grandchildren, she actually received a full passer

from us last week, Tuesday on the fourth of April. And our teams are

very heartbroken to get that message. So that's the first place

they stopped when they got there. All those people we had the week

before, their houses were affected with water, one meter high, you

know. And in all old people, all tensioners, they had to move

around, and they had to be taken away from there and moved to

higher ground. In all the other areas that we've been to, it's the

same. Everybody has noticed the infrastructure destruction. You've

seen the road, you've seen the houses, you see the wall. But what

we haven't captured is the trauma and the emotional damage that

people have suffered. They've been sitting in their homes. A stream

becomes a river overnight. I don't even overnight within minutes, and

people get washed away. Somebody's trying to catch their child or

their mother or their brother, all the life positions are washed

away, and that's a similar story throughout all the informal

settlements. Also, houses in low lying areas have been severely

damaged. So this is destruction. We haven't seen the end of it yet.

Once the roads open up and we get to more ideas, we're going to see

far more destruction. Talking about a house, your teams are here

at this house. We have standing right now behind me, the search

and rescue personnel are trying to recover our body. On Monday night,

the person's house, the world collapsed, came down to the

neighbor's house and collapsed over the domestic and since Monday

night, search and rescue teams have been battling to rescue the

or to take out the body of the individual that has passed on, and

what we do require, and if anybody is watching this program, bobcat

is required urgently to try to freeze this procedure and to

recover the person, to give them a decent burial. And it's similar

stories throughout the province, where there's just so much of

hardship, so much of pain and so much of trauma that's excluding

the infrastructure that damaged the first stories, the emotions

are far more deeper than what you can capture on television. Yeah,

no. Doctor Suleman, just a short while ago, speaking to the NEC for

health in the province normal, my colleagues go get established that

just in a teguni alone, by last night in the mortuaries in and

around Durban, there were 253 bodies. I mean, the scale and

magnitude of the devastation. I mean, it's going to take us days

to really get to grips with it.

We're not really sure of the figures. Then, you know, because

lots of people have been washed away with that storm coming and

that speed. Well, let's compare it this way. If shipping containers

can float on the end too and can be thrown against a breach with

that kind of weight, can you imagine what has happened to

people with simple checks that don't have the concrete walls to

protect them? We don't know how many people and when we get

feedback. When you see messages on social media and on different

medical checks, people will say, You know what this man told me?

See how his family members disappeared. It's not accounted

for and like that. We're probably going to pick up many more numbers

for the days to come.

Yeah. Now urgent interventions are being mobilized. You are on the

ground as civil society organization, gift of the givers,

as well as part of the emergency relief that is required. What

should the focus be? Particularly, because in many areas, there's no

water now there's no electricity.

Yes, that's a new challenge. Because what is required for those

who are not even affected by the floods, you know, the last day or

so, you're getting messages from from people who say the

municipality that the water purification systems are not

working. And today, we were surprised when numbers of people

started calling us for water, and we realized that the systems are

not working. And we asked, What about buying from the shop? They

said, there's no water in the shops too. So people are battling.

We are busy arranging super links truckloads of water to bring to

their.

And it's never going to be enough for so many hundreds of 1000s of

people, but it's part of our intervention in what we can do so

what the requirements is very, very big. And of course, food.

People are hungry. They need blankets. It's still raining. They

need warm clothes. And by by next week, a lot of people will have to

move and start rebuilding their homes, especially in informal

settlements. But of course, human settlements and local disaster

have to look at replacing those people on higher ground. You can't

keep building on flood plains, and you can have this problem over and

over again, but once a land is allocated, people are going to

need building material. Children are going to need school uniforms.

They're going to need stationery to go back to school. So the

challenges are many, but one of the biggest challenges right now

is bottle waters. Thank you very much. This gift of the givers,

founder, Doctor MJ Suleman on the ground in Peter marisburg for us

in KwaZulu, giving us a sense of what is happening, where their

property, where he's at. He just told us that there's rescue

operators, the rescue officials, trying to locate a body. So the

tally just goes up and up. We don't have an official final kind

of confirmation yet. We understand later today we should get that

from the authority to say exactly how many people may have been

killed here for.