Horror, grief, trauma in Ethiopia’s Gofa a week after deadly landslides

For days, retired teacher Meaza Tadelu has been holding on to hope that his missing wife may still be alive.

Barefoot and distraught, the frail 66-year-old looked on as younger volunteers dug through mud and earth in search of survivors in his village in Ethiopia’s Gofa Zone.

“She left home in search of household goods in the nearby market and I suspect she was trapped by the mudslide,” Tadelu, a local from the village of Daly, told Al Jazeera, his clothes and bony hands stained with mud.

The first disaster struck last Sunday, after days of torrential rains in the mountainous southern region triggered a deadly landslide that swept away houses and people.

Soon after, locals and police officers arrived to help. But another landslide on Monday swept even more people, including rescuers, away.

Tadelu’s brother was among the volunteers who went to help.

“When my own brother went out to search for [my wife] at the landslide scene, he, too, died,” he told Al Jazeera, looking devastated.

Like most of the villagers, Tadelu has had barely any sleep all week. The ordeal has left him shaken and worried, bursting into tears whenever he speaks of the tragedy.

Ethiopian authorities say at least 257 people perished in the disaster, a death toll the United Nations’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, expects to more or less double to 500.

According to OCHA, more landslides are feared, and some 15,500 people in the area are at risk of being affected, including at least 1,320 children under the age of five and 5,293 pregnant and lactating women.

On Sunday, a week after the tragedy, the wails of mourning women and crying children continued as mostly local men frantically excavated, searching for of hundreds of loved ones who were swept away and buried beneath mud. Authorities said search operations were continuing through the weekend.

The mountainous region has made it nearly impossible for heavy machinery to reach the area. So dozens of people have been digging away throughout the day since Monday, excavating by hand, searching for the missing with the help of spades and pickaxes.

‘He is gone’

Almaz Tadesae, a distraught mother in her 30s, sat in the embrace of her consoling sisters.

Tadesae lost her seven children in what felt like seconds, she said.

From her mud house in the hilly village of Daly, she witnessed her family engulfed by a tsunami of mud early on Monday morning.

They were returning home from a church service when the disaster ripped through the village. She had remained home that day, but now wishes she had not.

“I would be better dead than alive given the magnitude of grief that I am grappling with now,” Almaz wept as she told Al Jazeera.

On a field perched atop a hill, which is typically used to host religious and national celebrations, people gathered on Thursday to attend a mass funeral for the dead.

The ceremony was quickly organised by the local government and attended by hundreds of villagers, including those who had brought dead bodies on donkeys and carts to see them buried.

At the makeshift mourning ground, many people held photos of their missing family members, while donations were dropped off to help those affected by the landslides. On one side of the field, the dead were buried in unmarked graves.

There, 54-year-old Tamene Ayele was also mourning.

Ayele lost his family of four – including his youngest son who had rushed to the scene to find his siblings after the first wave of mudslides.

The 17-year-old was busy digging with his bare hands to help locate his family when the second landslide buried him alive.

Days on, with no trace of his son, bereaved Ayele is now convinced he, too, is dead.

“My son was a farmer like me, but had aspirations to go to college,” Ayele said in between sobs.

“He worked and studied hard and was supposed to be the first [in the family] to go to college, but now he is gone,” he added tearfully.

‘Terrible loss’

Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country, has one of the world’s highest economic growth rates, and is one of the region’s fastest growing economies.

Yet, the remote village of Daly and its grief-struck population are glaring evidence of the poverty that remains widespread.

Here, about 320km (199 miles) southwest of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, facilities are scarce, residents live in mud huts, infrastructure is desolate and no roads are paved.

The inability to get timely help, according to testimonies shared by locals, has made rescue efforts even more challenging.

In a statement, OCHA said the Ethiopian Red Cross only managed to arrive at the scene on July 23, with four trucks of life-saving supplies. Due to the heavy rains and difficult landscape, there are “significant challenges to physically access the affected areas”, OCHA added.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed posted on X on Tuesday that he was “deeply saddened by this terrible loss”, adding that the Federal Disaster Prevention Task Force has been deployed to the area and is working to reduce the impact of the disaster. But according to locals, the task force never arrived. Abiy, who paid a brief visit on Saturday with his wife to the disaster-struck village, planted a tree on the cemetery ground as a show of solidarity.

Plans to move the affected population are being finalised by the government, with more than 5,600 vulnerable people targeted for immediate evacuation, OCHA said on Friday.

Meanwhile, more than 500 people have been displaced, while locals said they are largely on their own trying to salvage the missing.

Amid lack of proper equipment and professional help, villagers spent days digging through the debris with anything they could improvise – including their hands, sticks, axes and shovels.

On Thursday, as they desperately dug away, young prisoners from a nearby detention centre were also brought in to help in the rescue efforts.

All the while, and despite assurances from local officials, the search for survivors has yielded limited success.

Increased landslides

Landslides have become a common phenomenon across the Greater Horn of Africa region, with experts attributing rapid deforestation in the mountainous zones as the leading cause.

In May 2016, about 50 people were killed following heavy rains and landslides, with some experts linking the extreme weather events to climate change.

Retired teacher Tadelu vividly remembers the 2016 landslide and the devastation it left behind.

Having lived near the struck site for 45 years, he said he had always anticipated this tragedy happening, but his efforts to alert local officials for possible mitigation measures bore no fruit.

And now he has been caught in it.

Tadelu knows his brother is now lost, and with palpable anxiety he waits for news about his wife.

But with days having passed, he knows the chances of her being safe are slim.

At night, Tadelu said he grapples with sleeplessness as he cannot help replaying the natural disaster that wrecked his life.

Yet together with fellow villagers, he still waits – armed only with hope and fortitude – excavating through the debris around them in a desperate attempt to find at least some of their loved ones alive.

“I just hope to find the closure I need to move onward,” Tadelu said.