Sixty-nine-year-old Ahmed Abubakr lives with his family in a small house in Al Muallah district of Aden. “I remember that day clearly,” says Ahmed. “It was heartbreaking to watch all our possessions gushing out with the floodwater. Right before our eyes, everything vanished. We had to run to the roof so we wouldn’t be swept away as well.”
From the roof, Ahmed and his family saw a messy stack of vehicles, mud, rocks and wreckages blocking the road. When they went down from the roof, they were shocked by what they saw. “There was no furniture,” he says. “Water and mud filled our house instead. We didn’t know what to do.”
Ahmed’s house was badly damaged – cracks appeared on the walls and the ground and it was necessary to quickly rehabilitate the house before it collapsed. Moreover, floods had washed away Ahmad’s taxi, which was the family’s only source of income.
With funding from START Fund, CARE’s emergency response for flood-affected areas provided urgent cash assistance for 631 affected families like Ahmed’s. The families gratefully used the cash to buy necessities and to rehabilitate their damaged houses.
With the cash assistance, Ahmed bought building materials and started to rehabilitate his home immediately, beginning with repairing the sewage system in the house to protect the family’s health.
In addition to cash assistance to affected families, the intervention supported the local authorities in Aden to remove tons of rubble and waste from the streets through providing waste containers as well as bulldozers and water displacement mechanisms.
“The situation is extremely difficult in Aden these days,” says Ahmed. “Many basic services stopped due to COVID-19 prevention. Although life is more difficult now, I’m grateful that I still get clean drinking water and can move freely. Life continues anyway.”
