As I’ve mentioned before, it has rained a lot in Ecuador this year. As we travelled through the country a few weeks ago I read each and every day in the newspapers about the chaos caused by the severe and apparently endless “invierno” - winter in English, but used to refer to the rainy season in Ecuador.

After spotting a Red Cross appeal for volunteers to help with emergency relief I got in touch with the Red Cross based in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. They agreed to let me accompany them on a relief mission to the flooded plains of Guayas province.

I wrote this piece speculatively for the BBC News website, where I work when not on six month vacations in South America, but because of boring administrative reasons they have been unable to publish it.

I reproduce it here and hope that some people will read it and get to hear about the floods, even if it’s not the thousands who visit the BBC each day.


Everyone in Ecuador seems to have a story to tell about this year’s rainy season.

In the capital, Quito, one torrential downpour in March led to the collapse of a vital road junction, crippling transport in the city and leaving thousands of commuters stranded.

In the high mountainous regions of the country, local people living in remote Andean villages are being forced to deal with regular landslides and frequent, intense thunderstorms.

Every day buses are delayed for hours on precarious mountain roads as passengers, drivers and locals club together to dig their transports out of the quagmire.

“This is not normal,” one local man said recently as we helped pull our bus through the third landslide of a long morning.

“This year the rain is worse than ever.”

But it is in Ecuador’s west, in the flood-prone lowland areas between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, where the rain has hit the hardest.

More than two months of ceaseless bad weather now appears to be easing, on the coast at least.

But the deluge - blamed by some on La Nina, a low-pressure system rising in the Pacific Ocean - is thought to have killed almost 50 people, forced thousands from their homes and cut off many of those living in some of Ecuador’s poorest villages.

The country’s government has helped, setting up temporary shelters in some areas and beginning work to shore up flood defences, such as redirecting rivers close to flood-prone villages, but there have been complaints they have not worked fast enough.

Eviction danger

In rural areas of Guayas province, pools of still water fill fertile fields normally used to grow rice and corn.

Mangled crops and trees lie close to the rivers and culverts that burst their banks during the worst of the weather.

In villages like Rocafuerte, a tiny hamlet home to a few dozen agricultural families, the rising waters literally washed homes away.

Pedro Sambaro, 48, is now living with his wife and four children in the grounds of a school turned into a temporary shelter. His house gradually disintegrated as the rain pounded down, he says. Since then he has lived off charity.

“The government has given us nothing, we have just the food and clothes that the Red Cross has given us,” Mr Sambaro says.

But even this temporary existence is under threat: soon the new term will begin at the school where they are now living, and Mr Sambaro, along with dozens of other families living in the school’s classrooms, faces the prospect of having to move again.

“I never thought this would happen to us, that we would have to take our children away from their homes. If we have to leave, who knows where we will go?”

Emergency missions

At least 12,000 families in five lowland provinces still need emergency assistance, says the Ecuadorean Red Cross, which has recently launched a new appeal for donations and volunteers amid fears that public interest in the situation is waning.

“The people of Ecuador have given a lot, but now they think the situation is improving,” says Carlos Flores, director of the Guayas Red Cross.

Although there have been some overseas donations, including from the EU and Spain, Mr Flores says they have not been enough. He does not criticise Ecuador’s government, but calls the flooding a “new situation” for the country.

“We have suffered from strong and unusual rains this year since the end of January. Some say they will return next year. We have to plan for the future and make sure we can deal with this if it happens again.”

Red Cross volunteers have been venturing out into Guayas to help those affected since the emergency began.

And while the rain may be easing, the situation is still serious: the largest mission, to feed more than 1,400 families, was just two weeks ago.

‘I have nothing’

When I accompanied the Red Cross to one area of Guayas, the organisation’s three trucks carried food, clothes and water rations for 601 families.

But in each place I visited, the numbers of those hoping for a handout considerably outnumbered the rations stashed in the back of the Red Cross truck.

Volunteers patiently explained the difference between the Red Cross - an independent organisation that helps who it can, when it can - and the government, whose responsibility it ultimately was to find food and shelter for those affected.

That distinction mattered little to Maria Parra, 76, who did not have a ticket entitling her to any of the 14 rations the Red Cross came to distribute in the village of Primavera.

“My clothes have been destroyed, I have nothing to wear except this, which I have to sleep in as well.

“We need food, we need water, and we don’t care who brings it,” she said, breaking into tears as she spoke.

“Every time it rains the water comes back into my house. My house is falling down.

“We were poor before and we are even poorer now.”

Driving back to Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, volunteer Esther Rodriguez said the aid effort needed to continue.

“It’s not raining now, but we need to carry on, and we need more of everything: rice, sugar, milk, beans, cereal.

“We probably need to go on for another month before the people can use their land properly again.

“But there’s no guarantee we will have enough money to keep going,” Ms Rodriguez warned, adding that even with clearer skies expected in the coming weeks, some victims of this year’s floods could still end up homeless and hungry.

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