My Neighborhood Watch #73 - Reporting Events Around us

Introduction

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In movies, you will see beautiful houses in front of the ocean and lovely couples in their beach attire, enjoying the sunlight and ocean breeze. Such a scene can make one dream of living close to the water because of the peace and tranquility that accompany it. I don’t know if my dad and the rest of the landowners were motivated by those Hollywood movies when they decided to get a house close to a river.

Unfortunately, reality has a way of spoiling things. Just a week ago, our seemingly perfect location, turned out to be a disaster for all the houses built close to the river banks. It’s as if the river goddess was furious, trying to reclaim all the stolen territory we have encroached on with our activities. (Just joking about the goddess)

The truth is, I’m from Rivers State, Nigeria, and it turned out that a large chunk of our landscape is covered by water. We've got the upland dwellers and the riverine dwellers. The people living in the riverine area are used to living close to the river. In order to make the place habitable, they hire dredging companies to pile sands to make the ground solid.

For those who can’t afford those dredging companies, they do it manually by hiring people to get mud and sand to fill a portion with their land. Due to how hard the task is, you hardly get a stable base compared to when a professional dredger fills your area. For those of us who fall into this category, flooding is inevitable.

Whenever there is serious rain or high tide, you see flooding taking over the less secured areas and spilling into people’s homes destroying their properties. Most time’s especially during September and October period, you will see the high tide creeping gradually almost close to the main road.

This is indeed a humbly experience that tells us that no matter how much we try to chase water back by creating land for ourselves, we should have it at the back of our mind that we’re only borrowing the land from the river because nature we always reclaiming it’s lost territory back. It may take time but sooner or later, it’ll happen.

But if there is one thing I’ve learned personally from this whole experience is that as much as nature offers us with so much beauty, we should also learn to respect it or else you are going to see nature’s unpredictable power and I’m very sure, you don’t want to witness it or else you think tsunami is a joke!!

I will be inviting @ochelebe and @lovelystar