“During the day, the tents are very hot and at night unbearable with all of us inside. So, I and my older children are sleeping outside the tent to escape the heat,” he said.
“We are keeping the children indoors as much as we can during daytime to prevent them from playing in the sun and getting dehydrated,” he said. “But you cannot coop children indoors for too long either,” Thaer explained.
For some of the IDP entrepreneurs in Qayara, the simmering weather means good business. Various small kiosks order truckloads of ice slabs to be delivered to the site and sold in pieces to children as ice-lollies, or in larger chunks to households seeking to chill drinking water and store food in the cooler boxes.
But this is only a partial solution to one of several problems being faced by camp residents at Qayara. Many IDPs are complaining about lack of electricity and shortage of water to run cooling systems.
The use of air coolers is problematic even when there is electricity. They require between 100 and 160 litres of water per day to operate. Currently, the recommended amount of water for each person per day is 15 litres of water for drinking, cooking and hygiene. IOM is developing an 11KVA grid in both Qayara and Haj Ali that will provide four AMPS of power to each tent.
IOM’s DTM has identified 61,724 families (370,344 individuals) currently displaced because of the on-going Mosul operations, since the military operations began in October 2016. Government and UN organizations estimate that tens of thousands are expected to flee once the battle for the old city in West Mosul commences.
Comments are closed.