Devastating Kenya floods kill hundreds and leave thousands more homeless

Joy had no choice.

As the flood waters rose around her, she climbed to the tin roof of her home in Mathare, Nairobi’s biggest slum.

Two of her children soon jumped to another building as the currents below intensified and their house began to creak in the pitch-black night.

But Joy, holding her baby boy in her arms, could not escape.

“I could hear people shouting in the dark ‘throw your baby’. I threw him towards the voices and the lights from the phones and then the roof started to collapse and I jumped,” she said.

Joy’s entire home, including her prized sewing machine she used to support her family, was washed away.

She is just one of thousands of Kenyans who have lost everything amid devastating floods that have shaken the country to its core.

Kenya’s wet season began in March, bringing with it the most catastrophic weather seen in years. Over the past two months, rainfall has been near constant, filling up water reservoirs and saturating rivers and flood-prone areas.

Against this backdrop, flooding has killed at least 228 people, with President William Ruto last week declaring a public holiday to mourn the victims.

More than 23,000 households have meanwhile been displaced and all schools temporarily closed amid the nationwide disruption.

Among the worst affected areas are the Mathare and Kiambiu slums in the capital Nairobi, home to a collective 550,000 people – including Joy.

Both settlements have rivers flowing through them, leaving them extremely vulnerable to heavy rain.

The poorest live along the river’s banks.

Megan Wright, Founder and UK Director of Tushinde Children’s Trust which supports the poorest children in the slums, told the Telegraph that the disaster is of a scale they have never seen before.

Almost a third of the families they support have lost their homes and they are now working to feed around 400 children a day.

“Food security in the area is terrible. These terrible floods meant that roads were washed away, the price of food has gone up massively, and the accessibility to food has gone down terribly,” she said.

At one point Tushinde was forced to scale back its humanitarian efforts for fear of riots over food supplies.

“We are still running a feeding programme, but have had to modify it so that we don’t put ourselves at risk of causing a riot,” Ms Wright said. “To feed up to 400 children, it’s costing us about £400 a day.”

The charity has reported cases of people being electrocuted during the flooding, in which makeshift electricity networks are unsafe and vulnerable to disruption.

Poorly built homes are particularly vulnerable to collapse; if their bases get wet the structure is significantly weakened, leading to fears of further casualties.

Médecins sans frontières (MSF) has reported cases of hypothermia in children – but now another immediate threat looms.

“Flooding-related risks extend beyond immediate injuries and displacement,” Hajir Elyas, MSF’s Head of Mission in Kenya, told the Telegraph.

MSF now worries that water-borne diseases like cholera and mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria could threaten the vulnerable population even further.

“Destruction of latrines leads to poor water and sanitation conditions, as people are still forced to use river water sometimes because there is no safe water available,” Ms Elyas said.

“The risks of water-borne diseases like cholera have increased … In the aftermath, breeding sites for mosquitos increase may lead to malaria outbreaks.”

Around 70 per cent of Nairobi’s population live in informal settlements, but they occupy just five per cent of the city’s land.

These congested living conditions can cause the outbreak of deadly diseases to spiral out of control.

MSF added that other flood-related health risks include respiratory infections, asthmatic attacks, and complications from interrupted medication regimens for chronic diseases.

Residents near rivers and other high-risk areas have been ordered to leave by the government, but with no relocation plan in place, these families have no place to go.

Ms Wright said many of the families they support are sheltering in schools and church halls.

“One of the mothers who we work with said, ‘I’m so glad you made me move because my neighbours refused to move, and now two of them are dead,’” she said.

Just last week a woman gave birth inside one of the makeshift shelters, Ms Wright added.

Like Joy, Catherine, a 28-year-old local in Kiambiu, lost everything she owned.

“I chose to save the children and our legal documents and then watched as everything submerged,” she said. “I feel like I am set back to zero.”

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