"I could not believe my ears and I just found myself crying"
The landslides that buried Bududa and Butaleja in Eastern Uganda on March 1st have left over 95,000 people displaced, 50% of which are children.
There's also 300 people still unaccounted for. Joyce Nandala's parents are amongst them.
Save the Children in Uganda has a family re-unifying tracking system and, if all goes well, Joyce will soon be with her family again.
Joyce's story
Joyce Nandala is 13. On March 1st, the fateful day of the landslides, she woke up as usual, ready for school. Since it was the 1st of the month, her parents were also up and getting ready for prayers. It’s a practice in their church to always celebrate the 1st of every month by going to church to give thanks.
She attended school as usual and got back home at 6:00pm hoping to find her parents back from church. To her surprise, no one was home.
Joyce ran to the neighbour’s place to inquire why the parents had not been back by that time, only to be told that the church had been swept away by the mudslide. “I could not believe my ears and I just found myself crying” she said.
The church was the first to be swept away by the mud slide at around 4pm, as she was told, and her parents have not been seen since that day.
Joyce now has no idea of how she is going to complete her education. “Our parents always took care of our school fees and now we are still confused” she confided. Her only hope is their uncle, who is a farmer with no steady income.
Now displaced and sleeping in a tent, Joyce still affords to wake up early for school with no breakfast nor lunch and only hopes to get supper prepared by the community. This has become the routine of her day-to-day life since the disappearance of her parents. And this is also where Save the Children in Uganda has intervened: to try and see if she can be re-united with her family.
