Afghanistan. Not only is it bedevilled by almost incessant armed violence, it's also subject to boiling summers. harsh winters and flash floods which can wipe out years of hard-won development in seconds. When homes are under threat, when making a living is impossible, people migrate. IOM is building walls all over Afghanistan - not to keep people out, but to hold back the floods and allow people to stay where they want to be - at home.
A hypermarket for disasters
Afghanistan is sometimes known as "a hypermarket of disasters" Whatever you name, disasterwise, they have it, 24/7, year in,year out. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, landslides, sandstorms, avalanches,bitter cold, searing heat... all that on top of relentless conflict and grinding poverty.
While the International Community worries about the big picture, in Afghanistan's towns and villages there are farmers who want to plant, parents who want safe houses, children who simply want to go to school.
IOM has recorded tens of thousands of families being displaced by disasters every year. Worryingly, the trend is on the rise.These disasters not only claim lives, injure people and damage homes, they also destroy livelihoods and place lives on hold while new houses can be built, land secured and jobs found.
It's hard to find funds to help the disaster-affected, as their needs are sometimes not seen as quite as pressing as the million or so people displaced by conflict, or the million projected to return across the border from years of living as refugees in Iran and Pakistan.
Bricks in the Wall
Disaster preparedness is the less glamorous cousin of Disaster Relief. In the latter, the so-called "relief cowboys" (and cowgirls) parachute into a shattered community, and proceed to take over local coping mechanisms, ordering tons of rice, flour, tinned food, clothes – which often arrive just as the local market is getting back on its feet. The relief cowboys are inevitably accompanied by TV crews and celebrity volunteers, who also skew the market, hog all the electricity and clean water, and whiz by the affected populations in air-conditioned land-cruisers, stopping for pieces-to-camera at shattered spots.
Disaster Preparedness is much more prosaic. It involves studying disaster patterns and finding durable solutions to perennial problems. Ideally, it includes local knowledge as part of the problem-solving.However, as climate patterns change, and storms, floods, erosion and sea-level rise impact on new areas, there simply are no traditional coping mechanisms,and they have to be invented.
Less glamorous it may be, but Disaster Preparedness works, and it works much better than waiting until the house is on fire before you buy a fire extinguisher.
At first glance, it's not immediately obvious why IOM, the UN's Migration Agency, should be carrying out this work anyway. But when you spend time - as IOM does - listening to the community, and hear how difficult farming, forestry, agriculture and related industries have become, you begin to see how the fabric of society can unwind in the face of disaster. The youngest and brightest leave to find work, and, sometimes within a generation or two, a whole village, which may have been around for hundreds of years, begins to die out.
IOM's answer in Afghanistan has been to work with the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Agency (ANDMA) to construct vast walls of rock, tightly packed in what looks like giant chicken wire. These so-called gabion walls take their name from the Italian gabbione (big cage). You’ve seen them used for erosion control, or as the foundation for embankments on motorways. They work well in flood control as they act as a barrier, a ready made riverbank, and an immovable obstacle.