Lynne Kirkham is a volunteer with the emergency mapping NGO MapAction. She is currently in northern Namibia where flooding continues to affect thousands of people.

This blog was written on April 2 2009

During the past few days the situation has worsened for people stranded by flood waters across the Caprivi region - the narrow strip of land in the north east of Namibia which borders Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe - as fresh rainfall in Angola flows into an area already hit by serious flooding.

It's been five days since I arrived here with a U.N. disaster and coordination assessment group after driving 1,300 kilometres from Namibia's capital Windhoek.

Until today my understanding of the disaster came from visits to camps for people displaced by flooding, satellite images and the statistics and data I've been using to produce Map Action's situation maps.

This morning I flew by helicopter across the area that I've been mapping for the past five days. The flight was put on for a group of bilateral donor representatives.

The scenes astonished us: many, many villages submerged across an area three thousand square kilometres. Flooding from horizon to horizon.

The other camps I've visited this week have been shifting to higher ground as the waters rise. But today I visited one site where people have no such choice.

We landed at Schuckmansberg camp which is on a dry area in the middle of the swamp. It has become an island with 3,000 people on it.

The people at Schuckmansberg have little food or clean water. People are drinking the stagnant flood water - they have no other option. These conditions are the perfect breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Sanitation is also desperate. With very few latrines the people have to use the limited bush around the camp as their toilet and the threat of disease outbreaks looms.

Some people have the means to travel to buy provisions for their families back at Schuckmansberg. This involves taking a boat across the border into Zambia and then continuing their trip by road.

The journey is fraught with danger and emotionally and physically exhausting. Crossing the border is not easy as there are hardly any boats with motors, and the unstable wooden canoes the people use are dangerous. This is time-consuming and involves the daunting prospect of coming back across the water in the dark when the hippos and crocodiles are most active.

Most of the affected people here are subsistence farmers whose crops - just about to be harvested when the floods hit - have been destroyed by the flooding and whose livestock are either dead or stranded in the swamp.

It's a desperate situation and many people here expect that they will be at the camp for many months to come.

To see Map Action's latest maps from the region, take a look at AlertNet's map catalogue.

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