Nowhere to go

Dr. Abu Conteh

It’s 12pm on a bright beautiful Monday morning, and the sun is beginning to get ahead of me. I am visiting the Soja town section of the Moyiba community to talk to Sia, whose house was recently destroyed by a mudslide.

Moyiba is one of the most deprived informal settlements in Freetown, which is also exposed to multiple hazards including mudslides.

Sia is a single mother of three who makes a living from stone mining.

As I ascend the over 600-meter-high hill, I couldn’t help but wonder how women in this rugged part of the community deal with climate hazards and access healthcare. In the past years, women in this section of the community have had to deliver babies by the side of the road as they couldn’t make it to the only government health clinic in time about 3 kilometers away. Transportation here is a challenge, as motor bike riders complain of rugged roads.

As I arrive at Sia’s home, she greets me warmly and offers me a seat in her delipidated single bedroom mud house that was destroyed by a huge boulder (in 2025). The house is now a relic of the original two-bedroom house built by her husband who died two years ago.

“The destruction of the house has changed my life so badly”, she said.

She recounted her daily horrors of having to live in a leaking house or rebuilding it with
her meagre income. “I can barely feed by children, let alone rebuild this house.”

As I looked around, I could see that most houses here are built with mud bricks, which makes
them vulnerable to extreme weather events such as flooding and mudslide.

Sia recounts she is not the only woman affected. ‘‘Last year, one woman lost two children because of a mudslide,” she said.

While she feels the community is not safe, she is worried about having to leave a whole life behind that she has built for over a decade. ‘‘I have nowhere to go. We are not offered any help by the ‘’big ones.’ No one has helped me since my house got destroyed,” she said.