Dinka people rebuild flood defences by hand each day to stop homes sinking
Each day they rebuild river defences using clay and papyrus, but increased flooding driven by recent climate change has made their homes even more vulnerable to flooding.
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00:01People from a Kwak community of South Sudan battle daily to keep their heads above the water.
00:07Each day water is literally encroaching on their land on a channel off the river Nile.
00:13Each day they rebuild river defences using clay and papyrus,
00:17but increased flooding driven by recent climate change has made their homes even more vulnerable to flooding.
00:24The reason why this water is coming out is that the soil underneath is not compacted well.
00:28So there are spaces through which the water can come up because it is something built by hand.
00:35So it will be maintained like the work Anyethe is doing there.
00:39He will put some soil on top of it and compact it.
00:44To build the islands, we start by spreading grass where we want to raise the ground.
00:50Then we go and cut papyrus and we level it on top of the grass.
00:54And then after that, we put soil on top.
00:56This is how to make the ground stronger and higher.
01:01South Sudan is considered the seventh most vulnerable country to climate change globally according to the United Nations.
01:07This year alone, over 375,000 people were displaced by flooding in the East African nation according to the UN agencies.
01:15We are doing this every year because we are staying in a lowland.
01:19So whenever the water rises with the flooding from the Nile or from rainwater,
01:23we have to do this to protect ourselves so that we are not chased away by water.
01:27But the past couple of years have been extremely testing and the local authorities estimate 2,000 of their quark people are persevering on the islands.
01:40Fishing is central to the community's existence.
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