Imtiaz Sooliman – KZN FOODS Gift of the Givers joins several other humanitarian efforts in KZN
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss various struggles and challenges faced by the housing industry, including domestic disputes, death in houses, and the difficulty of finding deceased relatives. They stress the need for more stringent enforcement and control of housing, as well as the importance of retaining houses and avoiding flood attacks. The challenges faced by the industry, including road conditions, delays, and lack of connectivity, lead to people traveling long distance and face road challenges. The speakers hope to finish some of these struggles soon and make it affordable for everyone.
AI: Summary ©
Relief organization, gift of the givers has joined several other
humanitarian efforts in KwaZulu Natal its founder, Dr Imtiaz
Suleiman, joins us now to share their experiences on the ground in
parts of the affected flooding. Now I remember seeing a tweet of
yours, Dr Suleiman, saying that you needed to be for this exact
operation.
It is such a heart wrenching piece of news to even share with the
nation. Tell us where you got involved in what happened
evening to be so I'll first start off what Joaquin said that you had
we started off now we got a call from that same area at 5am on
Tuesday morning, a story about the grandmother and three children,
and the person who called us, he said, you know, people were here
last week, and the grandmother that passed on, we delivered a
food parcel to her, and
we were shocked, the same area in Flamingo heights that were
affected. So our teams went, because they felt very emotional
about that, went to the area, and at that point, the grandmother was
just picked up, you know, they were found the body. And they
found the body of the two children, the third, the fourth
child, the third child was not found, but late in the day, the
child was found, and we met the same people that were given food
parcels to the week before, just a week before, and all those people
are all people, pensioners, you know, and tremendously distraught
within minutes, their houses, their breaths, but one meter high
in water, and did move to higher ground. It was, it was, it was
start of our intervention in KZN. The story of the TLB was also a
personal story. I'm not going to me. One of the pictures I saw on
one of the channels was that this house was belonging to house of a
friend, and then I get the message that this friend's house of the
war. Outward. Sound came through the window into the dining room,
water came through the lady and husband and wife are friends of
ours. She shouts and she worries about her sons in the room, and
then runs upstairs to see her husband. Whilst this is happening,
the neighbor from downstairs, which is around the house, the
same guy, runs upstairs to see what happened to this first house,
the auto medical people and the people in the first house of
medical people while they're running up the neighbor from the
third house higher up, start shouting, be careful. The wall is
falling down on your house. And these people are traumatized
because their daughter is in the house and the domestic is in the
room in her quarters, outside, and as they rush down into the house,
the war falls on the domestic, and she's screaming inside, and they
try to see how they can get out, but it's a mountain of debris on
the domestic and you can't pull out, and they hear screams and a
cry, and it just traumatize them. At that point, a certain rescue
people come. It's still raining, and you know, there's no access to
anything at that moment. You can't bring any cope and roads agenda.
There's no way to carry items and would they bare hands and and
shovels, they try to move up the rubble, but the rain just made it
impossible. And then I got the message. Today, I went to pay a
courtesy visit, and I saw them still struggling. And at that
point, I said, look, they need to, but actually it wasn't a TLB a
bobcat, because to bring it through into the yard, there's a
space there. Also we needed a smaller machine. And as we were
waiting, somebody responded, a person came to try to get a
bobcat, but then it became too late, and they couldn't work
anymore because the house is unstable. But there was, well,
good news in inverted commas and sandwis at the same time from the
kitchen area, we could get the smell of the deceased, you know,
the and we knew the disease was there, because one of the
challenges was, you don't know where the disease is in all that
rubber. Is it higher up? Is it five meters up, five meters down
in a minute, where it's a disease buried? But when you got the smell
of the of, you know, decomposition. And then as they
dug deeper, they found a door. That door belongs to the family of
the deceased domestic. And then little later, they found a wallet,
a file, it belongs to the domestic that was given to her as a gift by
the owner of the house. And when the owner of the house saw that,
she was very, very distraught, because, you know, she was very
attached to the to the domestic. So that process is not over yet,
but I think we're close to the end, that if the bobcat comes
tomorrow morning, I think by sometime tomorrow, the body will
be recovered and a dignified look and then rearranged. It is just so
difficult hearing about these various incidents, but it's
important to share with the world. Doctor Suliman and I've been with
you on
some of these missions. It's amazing the work that your people
do. Just tell us what you need, what you have, and what do you say
to people who, if your voice reaches them right now, who may
be.
In trouble, how to get out of the line of danger?
Well, it's a bit late now, to be honest. You know, for the years,
we always tell people don't belong low like areas. And unfortunately,
you know, given the circumstances, people go to the low lying areas,
they go to flood plains, they go to rivers. They get their water
from there. It's something we have to change the mindset in the
country. But also, we need more stringent regulation that controls
where people can be. Can burn their houses. But secondly, also
to make it fair and accessible and make it, you know,
acceptable to the people the land has given away from servitude,
away from low lying areas we can't do much about. You know, even the
more rain comes in the weekend, you're not going to move 1000s of
people now where you're going to put them suddenly. You know, all
you can do is tell, tell them, be careful when the rain starts
coming, move to higher ground. That's all the information that
you can give right now, you can't tell the move before that, because
nobody's going to move before that. People wait. Are scared,
they will lose their spot. They will lose their sight. Somebody
else will build there. So nobody's going to move away in advance.
It's never going to happen unless we have structured, organized, you
know, formal houses where people live in the houses, and it's well
understood. So that's not what happened. Secondly, if water is
coming up behind your wall, be careful. You may have to move out
of your house, because this was a well established house of the
friends and the board came falling down. In terms of long term we do
now for the future, I think we need engineers and we need
builders to really look at how retaining walls are done. Because
a lot of retaining walls are falling down. Do we need to put
holes in there for what do they escape through there? What has to
be done to rebuild them in a specific way so we don't have this
kind of damage. In addition to that, how our roads burn? Why do
our bridges keeps? Keep collapsing? In some areas, when
there's earthquakes, the bridges don't fall down. You know, do we
have to put mostly more concrete, use different types of formulas
and to see what's being built in other parts of the world? I'm not
saying our engineers are not doing a good job. I'm saying, given the
circumstances, we may have to make them more strong, because we can
see this,
yes, and and also, why do we not have enough helicopters? It's not
the first time we got floods. In case, again, we had floods in 2019
we had floods in Eastern Cape. We need to invest in more
helicopters, more boats, more paramedics, train, more people
along the entire coast. Because when the Cyclones come, when the
floods come, it's always mostly along the coast, starting from
Empire, getting all the way to port Edmonton. And in that area,
we need to have more trained people, more personnel on standby,
because even if you have the boats in the central area, the roads are
not possible. You can't fly helicopter at that point. You know
the immediate helicopter on the weather settles to take people off
from the roof or somewhere else, but we need more boats along the
line. Do we have enough surplus blankets and mattresses stored
away in disaster warehouse? There isn't. It's all NGOs that come
forward with that kind of items. In most cases, municipalities
don't have that. So those are all the time of precautions. But
congratulation to all the people that about the neighbors, such a
rescue people. And you know, everybody's standing together to
help each other. So let's stay with that. Doctor. Suleimano,
obviously, the work is not over, as we mentioned earlier on. More
rains are expected, and I want to talk about the challenges that you
face when you do this sort of work, the rescue and recovery
work. It was quite intriguing to read a report from the eteguini
municipality spokesperson saying that at some point there were some
12 crocodiles that had escaped that there's a hunt on for three
crocodiles. So not only are you dealing with rogue, free roaming
crocodiles, there's lack of connectivity. Vodacom has said
it's working on that. Eskom is helping with electricity, but we
know there are areas without water. There are many people
without shelter, as you say, and the numbers are just too many.
What do you need? How should people get it to you? And what are
the challenges that you're contending with?
I The challenges are simple, it's too many people who need help too
quickly, and it's impossible to get everywhere at the same time.
That's that's the first thing. And secondly, when you get to an area,
you suddenly realize that they were more people, but they
couldn't tell you before because the network was not working, and
then the roads were inaccessible, so you couldn't get to do physical
examination in different areas. And even we do physical
examination, it's impossible to cover the area from from the north
to the south. It's just too many areas to do. So you are dependent
on networks, on priests calling you, on community leaders calling
you on our own networks that we have with 30 years in the
business. We have people on the ground everywhere and during the
summer and race of July last year, and the floods of 2019
and of course, all the things that we do every other day throughout
the country, we build networks. And people do call us and they
give us some kind of feedback, but they also didn't have enough
feedback because they couldn't drive to the areas, and there was
no communication, so people couldn't call them to tell them
what's happening. So when the roads became open now.
Realize it's not five people, it's it's 50 people in Italian so
that's the challenge when you don't have accurate numbers. But I
mean, it's not impossible to sort out. You just go the next day.
It's not a train Smash. You deal with what you can today and do the
balance tomorrow. The challenge is the roads has been the biggest
challenge. For the first time, we couldn't reach areas. You know,
our teams were in Tonga. They got to Durban in the supreme was 15
minutes. It took them two and a half hours changing roads,
changing direction. They just couldn't find a road to get with
Supreme Court. So that was a big challenge in terms of roads, and
then, of course, the volume of supplies that you need, the and
you need big trucks to carry the volume so you can get things
faster. But big trucks can't move on those roads. There's too much
of mud. The roads are damaged. You can't move around, so you need
much smaller trucks, or you need buckies, or you need smaller cars,
and all that just takes so much time. So yes, it will eventually
get done. But the problem is, people are desperate. They need
food straight away. They need water straight away. You need
blankets road straight away. And you know, it's, it's fortunate
that a lot of community people get together, sell their own feeding
schemes for the people in your area, which helps a lot and gives
you time to bring the biggest stuff and the the food passes for
longer that you require when this soft age is over, the meals, the
hot meals, the blankets, the mattresses, the clothing people
are then going to need given if they're going to the same site, we
don't know what's going to happen. Are they going to move the
highest? The highest sites in the informal settlements? All of them
are going to need building material, and that's where the
community can support. The country can support. Lots of finance will
be required for rebuilding those materials. And the other thing
right now, as you know, the water plants are not working well, so
lots of bottle there's liquids for bottled water all our kids in it,
because people just can't buy. It's not available, okay? So we
try to move and contract those water into the into the into city.
Doctor Suleman, thank you so much for speaking to us. Much, much
appreciated. Doctor MTS Suleiman, who is the founder of gift of the
givers, go on Twitter and you'll be able to find their details.