Household & Community Response to Annual Flooding in Rural Bolivia

Abstract

The rainy season in South America results in flooding that devastates communities by destroying homes and spreading illness and disease. The small, rural village of Villa Alba-El Beni, Bolivia experiences annual flooding but has little way of preparing for the damage. The housing of the village is destroyed each year and never quite rebuilt, and with each exposure to the dirty floodwaters, more individuals become ill. After two subsequent years of recordbreaking floods, I traveled to Villa Alba during the summer of 2008 to interview ten households about their experiences with and reactions to the flooding. The parallels between conversations with residents of the village and information found in literature review suggest that a household and community response to the flooding would dramatically decrease the negative effects on both housing and health.