Flood victims play the waiting game

Sitting outside the shell of a structure that will one day be part of West Africa's biggest shopping centre, Aicha Dieng watched a small queue forming outside the nearby toilet facilities - such as they are. "There are only three portable toilets for 96 families here," said Dieng, who moved into the building site here last month after floodwaters forced her from home. Dieng is among some 20,000 people living in tents, schools and other temporary shelters such as the Thiaroye shopping-centre-to-be since August, when the heaviest rains to hit the Senegalese capital in two decades flooded their homes. The government, which estimates that some 180,000 people have been affected by the rains and at least 50,000 forced to abandon their homes, is providing makeshift shelters and food. But life for the refugees is far from easy. At Dieng's current home at the Thiaroye building site, permanent toilets and showers are on the way but there is still no end in sight to their construction begun in early September. "People have to go out into the bushes to relieve themselves," said Ousseynou Badio, the Red Cross coordinator in another part of the Thiaroye camp, which is accommodating 4,400 people in all, according to the latest military estimates. However, the lack of toilets and irregular sewage disposal are not the only problems. Flooded roads and a dispute between the government and the private company in charge of rubbish disposal in and around Dakar have resulted in piles of litter being left to rot across the city. "We dig pits for the garbage," said Badio. "It's not good but it's the best option we have." This combination of water and garbage can be lethal, as demonstrated by a months-long cholera epidemic that has hit more than 25,000 people countrywide. But although Dieng said her block of the shopping centre had a real malaria problem due to all the stagnant water, there have been few cases of cholera inside the camps so far. Abdou Fall, a volunteer coordinator for a humanitarian group, said almost all of the dozen cholera cases inside the Thiaroye camp were people who had stayed behind in unhygienic flooded homes to guard against looting and who only came to the shelters once they fell ill. "The situation for those who stayed behind is much worse," he said. Many still live in flooded homes In Guinaw Rail, the working-class neighbourhood of more than 100,000 people that Dieng still calls home, the floodwater and waste helped to create a cholera epidemic shortly after August's heavy rains. "We had a lot of cholera," said Abdoulaye Diop, the mayor of Guinaw Rail South. "In August, I was hearing of two or three deaths per day but now it's starting to get better." Flooding has been a recurring problem in recent years, according to Mayor Mamadou Ba of Guinaw Rail North which, like its southern counterpart, is located in a poorly-drained swampy area where stagnant water thrives. "But this year, it's a catastrophe," he said. "My community is 100% flooded." And while government officials initially brought in bleach, mosquito nets and water-pumps, state help has dried up since, according to the mayor of Guinaw Rail South "They know what's going on here," he said. "But they're not helping and we don't know how to get out of this bind." The two mayors and many of the local people said they would be lost without the help of Cheikh Modou Kara, a local religious teacher who has hundreds of thousands of followers in Senegal. For the last month, many of his disciples have been building dikes and canals and providing pumps to drain the water. "What these people are doing is really great," said Lamine Sarr, one of the residents who stayed behind to watch over his flooded family home. Kara explained that his disciples' actions were a religious act and they would stay until the floodwaters receded. "They don't have the right to abandon this neighbourhood," he told IRIN. In spite of this help, state intervention is needed if the current problems are not to drag on into December, according to the two mayors. "If the government washes its hands of us, we'll be sunk," said Guinaw Rail North's Ba who believes the solution is to rebuild the community with proper drainage. Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade has called for precisely these measures in an emergency plan known as the Jaxaay Plan that would relocate people to new houses with adequate drainage at state expense. But back at the Thiaroye shopping centre where it is taking months just to build a block of toilets, Dieng and her fellow refugees are not convinced by political promises. They would settle for going home. "They can't move us," she said. "There are just too many people."