MADINAH, 1 February 2005 — The floods that ravaged Madinah last week did not spare anyone, including nomads living in the wild.

Al-Madinah newspaper reported that the nomads are constantly under threat from the vagaries of nature but they would live to see another flood sweeping by. The daily interviewed some nomads affected by last week’s flash floods that hit many parts of Madinah.

Abu Zaal said: “We have been living in the wild for many years. We suffer from lack of proper housing. If you look around, you can see 200 nomads like me, most of them are old men and women living in wooden homes. We cannot live in modern houses and we do not have money that we can use to build proper homes. The latest floods that struck Madinah and the villages surrounding Madinah put us in untold misery. I saw our neighbor in the tent crawling out with her five-year-old child trying to escape the flood. Because her husband was not there, I carried her to safety to a higher ground in a nearby mountain. If she had stayed in the tent for ten minutes, she would have died because the entire place was getting flooded.”

A few meters away from Abu Zaal’s place sits another family of four women and an old man outside their wooden home that was damaged by the flood. The old man was waiting for help because he could not do anything to rebuild his home to shelter his family. He kept crying as Al-Madinah tried to get him to talk about his plight. Sitting next to the old man was Um Mamdooh inside a dilapidated tent with her children. She lives with her blind husband and she does not know about the danger posed by the floods; only that it is threatening their place every rainy season.

Saleem Al-Sumairi, a blind man living with his wife and children in a small tent, was happy when he saw the Al-Madinah reporters thinking that they were government officials coming to help. He said, “We stayed for two days cut off from the outside world after the flash floods struck the place. We are still waiting for help from officials but until now nobody has come. I did not get any help or support and I am a blind man with children and do not have food to eat.”

The question that is still unanswered is, where are the charity organizations? Why didn’t they provide any help for them? Why are they ignoring these poor people? All what these people are asking for is a place to stay in. One of the old people in the place said, “All what I want to see before I die is a place for my children to stay in.”