Let us picture a scenario:

In a climate Change disaster. Sorry that statement is abit complicated. Lets simplify it.

If it starts raining at a certain point in future, and it rains, and it rains, the whole day, it reduces abit but then continues later, changing between too much rain, storms and medium volumes of rain then going back to too much rain. It goes on for a week, 2 weeks or more.

When that happens you will stop moving around like you do regularly, you will need to stay inside. Of course on the first days you will think well this is normal rain let me collect some. Then it will be 3 days and you won't need any more, the roads from your home to the main street will be so muddy and impassable.

Some cities are built on hills so In the valley areas of the city it will be flooding, the slums will flood, mud wattle houses and shelters will be destroyed, property will float away, the clean water will be mixed with sewage from your neighbor's toilet septic tank. At this time you will have too much water all over, yet no safe water. You will start crying to the government and the government response will be very slow or sometimes will not even come.

This is what is coming.

But we can prepare for it.

Preparations should start from an individual level, then to a communal level, then the local leaders can be considered to help but they should not be your priority. The government should not be trusted to deliver, they won't. You are all alone and you have to take care of yourself, your family and your surrounding community.

Do not expect any payment for this work you are going to put in, it is for your own good.

First and Foremost, our family Members;

Family members should be tagged or should carry cards stapled to their clothes or words written on their clothes. These words should have contact information for other family members so that if a member is lost his/her family can be traced.

Communities should mobilise groups of able-bodied men and women, 50 men per community of 100 homesteads, each homestead should provide a tool; A spade here, a hoe there, a wheelbarrow here, a bucket, a shovel there, rakes, forks, pitchforks, gloves, gumboots and so on.

Every able-bodied man and woman should have a tool in hand.

Next is digging up trenches, If you have the trenches already in place, you need to clear them up, because most of the existing ones have stagnant water and objects including plastics, polythene, and metal;- dig these things out and clear the trenches for the water to easily flow through.

For those communities who do not have these trenches, or the trenches they have are not enough you have to draw a map of how you are going to dig trenches that will direct water to a place where it will not destroy property. Then the able-bodied men should start digging. They can dig in shifts to ensure works moves on faster.

This kind of work is physical and it is going to require food for especially the men doing the donkey work. The community should collect food, cook and provide for these men. A Woman community leader can lead the cooking contigent.

While this is going on, this is where the Local Leaders or Local Council Leaders come in.

The Local leaders should prepare mass emergency shelters for the thousands of evacuations that are going to come, these shelters should be in a less affected area. Shelters include Tents, cargo containers, sandbags(bags of sand or soil piled together to shield one from incoming danger), floating homes and many others. However these emergency shelters should also have safeguards, a good trench system that directs the floods away or to the existing trenches can be a good start, Sandbags are also another option.

All these will help both when the disaster has not yet started and after it has started. If we can mitigate even to the smallest damage, we will have created a template for dealing with such disasters in the future.

To be Continued....