Lucia was sheltering with her infant son and three young children when her mud built home was swept away, as Cyclone Idai raged through southern Malawi, earlier this month.
Not far from her, Esnart and her three children (pictured) had fled their home, finding sanctuary in the limited shelter provided by a large nearby tree.
Catherine, who had raced to rescue her elderly grandmother from the storm returned home the next morning to find her home reduced to rubble.
Lucia, Esnart and Catherine have spent the weeks since that fateful night living with thousands of others in a temporary internal displacement camp created outside Joho village in Malawi’s Machinga District.
Joho is one of 173 camps in the southern African country that are now providing basic refuge for close to 87,000 households displaced by the Cyclone and the severe flooding that it caused.
Self Help Africa, which has worked in Malawi for close to 20 years, has teamed up with local and international responders to provide emergency relief to farming families who have been torn away from their homes and their lands by the catastrophe.
In Machinga, we are helping to provide basic provisions and relief supplies, including buckets, basins, water purification tablets, mosquito nets, food and non-food items to more than 1,000 households who have been displaced, and are helping with materials to allow communities to establish safe temporary toilets and other measures that are attempting to prevent a bad situation from getting even worse.
In this emergency, your donations are vital to help more families escape the dire conditions of the displacement camps, and return home with the basic items they need to provide for their children.