On the next day the team got ready early as we supposed to visit a village on the outskirts of Kurnool town. Soon some local policemen arrived to escort us to the village. We drove for nearly an hour through flood affected areas. For kms at a stretch one could see mountains of waste material on both sides of the road, which people had dumped from the town and the nearby villages. One could see stuff like sacks of food grains, clothes, books, furniture, kitchen items, electronic items like TV, radio, fridge etc which had been totally damaged by the flood waters. Even though there had been an early warning about the impending floods, initially the people did not take it seriously. Only after seeing the rising waters, hastened with the continuous rains for more than 24 hrs, did the people start the evacuation and then too they could not carry anything with them as they had no place to stock it or store it till the waters receded. The whole area had been inundated under nearly 30 feet of flood and rain waters. The only way how we could come to the conclusion was by seeing hay, plastic and other garbage hanging from electric poles, cables and tall trees.

Flood waters had also flown over the recently constructed National highway which was also over 30 ft high. As a result of the fury of the flowing waters, the highway was washed away in many places, leaving the traffic in long jams. From a four lane Highway it had become a single lane makeshift one, allowing traffic from opposite direction to only pass through slowly at intervals. Huge chunks of railways tracks had also been washed away in places resulting in the cancellation of dozens of trains, leaving tens of thousands of passengers stranded at either end. What can even Govt’s do in the face of such unimaginable natural disasters? Even a developed country like the US had great difficulty in managing the aftermath of the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina, than what to speak of governments of developing countries like India, with limited resources.

We soon reached the village after traveling thru washed away roads, dirt roads and roads still submerged under dirty water. The villagers eagerly greeted us and we set up the camp in a primary school building. We could hear the familiar discussion about us saying that this group is from Kerala, and that they have a big hospital ….

The doctors worked continuously with only a short break for lunch. Most of the cases were simple ones needing only some light medication. The villagers were happy to hear and know of Amma. They kept enquiring whether Amma would visit that area soon?  Some of them wanted to know if Amma would reconstruct their houses for them, as they had heard that the Math has undertaken such rehabilitation work after many such natural disasters. Many NGO’s were working in nearby areas and so some of the basic needs of the villagers had been taken care of by them.

The next day we planned to distribute clothes, food materials and slippers to some of them.

– Sadasiva Chaitanya