Kinama storm victims still waiting for aid

Two weeks after a storm destroyed their homes, some 15,000 residents of a suburb of the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, are still waiting for aid to rebuild their homes, a local official told IRIN on Wednesday. "The Ministry of Social Action and Women's Promotion came to assess the needs and promised to supply the people with iron sheets but it keeps telling us that it is still collecting them," Jean Pierre Ntigacika, the chief of Kinama suburb, said. He added that no other government agency or NGO had so far offered to help. The storm hit the northern suburbs of Bujumbura 20 February, destroying at least 300 homes in Kinama. One of the home owners, Melchior Nzeyimana, told IRIN that he moved with his wife and eight children into a neighbour's two-roomed home after the storm destroyed his. "We thought the situation was temporary but nothing has changed two weeks later," he added. Other residents have made attempts to rebuild their homes using damaged iron sheets but they have to use stones to hold them together. Another resident said the rebuilt structures leaked badly whenever it rained. Villaggio Cardito, a cluster of 45 homes offered by an Italian priest to the displaced people, are being rehabilitated to host the storm victims. The priest was helping masons with the rehabilitation on Tuesday. The storm also destroyed Kinama Primary School, which had an estimated 1,000 pupils. There have not been any efforts to rehabilitate it and, because of a countrywide teachers' strike, the school is empty. Ntigacika told IRIN that if no one offered to rehabilitate the school, secondary and primary school students would have to take turns to learn in the open when schools reopened. Most Kinama residents are low-income earners whose homes had been destroyed during the 10-year civil strife in the country. The vice-chairman of the National Commission for Rehabilitation of Disaster Victims (Commission Nationale de Rehabilitation des Sinistres), Joseph Nzeyimana, said last week that the commission would tours all Bujumbura suburbs to ensure that iron sheets reached the needy. The announcement, made at a news conference, followed complaints that the iron sheets donated did not reach the intended beneficiaries and were instead diverted to build villas in other residential areas of Bujumbura.