Micro disasters: Expanding the social work conceptualization of disasters

Context

Kenya faces many forces that combine to form slow violence. Kenya was colonized by the British who exploited resources and degraded the environment, much of which has not been repaired (Wrong, 2009). The British ruled through ethnic division and repression. Ethnic tensions remain today, which limits unity across communities (Hornsby, 2013). The national leadership of Kenya has kept the colonial system largely intact, which has enriched the few and oppressed the many (Wa Kinyatti, 2010). Forty million people in Kenya live in poverty, and living standards have decreased in the country’s 60 years of independence (Wa Kinyatti, 2010; United Nations Development Program [UNDP], n.d.). Kenya spends almost US$600 million per year servicing its external debt (Maathai, 2009). This is a high portion of the budget and money that could be spent elsewhere.

Kenya has one of the highest population growth rates in the world (National Coordinating Agency for Population and Development [NCAPD], 2010). This has caused rapid urbanization into unplanned and unsupported slums (Population Action International [PAI], 2012) and an increasingly high unemployment rate (NCAPD, 2010). Kenya is an environmentally fragile country; communities struggle with issues such as widespread deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, droughts, floods, waste, and pollution (Maathai, 2009; Ministry of Environment and Mineral Resources, n.d.; World Bank, 2017). The population explosion will contribute to further environmental degradation as resources become increasingly overused and scarce (NCAPD, 2010). While environmental problems have been documented in Kenya, there is little written about the impacts of environmental changes and disasters on local communities and there is a particular dearth of research on the unique experiences of vulnerable and marginalized Kenyans.

Kenya has weak state services, and the support that is available is often highly corrupted so it does not reach the people in need (Watsa and Warutere, 2013). The social work profession is underdeveloped in Kenya. There are not enough education programs and not enough trained social workers on the ground (Wairire, 2014). Poor Kenyans are affected by all of these processes, many of which are out of their control (Maathai, 2009). Exploring the impacts of environmental degradation in Kenya provides an analytically productive case in examining the complex forces that combine to form slow violence and disasters, particularly among the poor.

Advisory Board

To infuse slow violence concepts into the methodology, an Advisory Board of poor Kenyans in the study population guided this study. I, the researcher, met the Advisory Board members while I worked on an environmental justice project in their communities for a local non-governmental organization (NGO). Over the course of 2 years we built our relationships, and those who were interested in the environment, social work and development, and research joined the project. The Advisory Board was not a fixed group with stringent requirements, rather people helped as they could. This choice was intentional as the Advisory Board members were vulnerable and needed flexibility. Advisory Board members had several commonalities. All were rural to urban migrants due to drought. They were severely impoverished, well below the Kenyan urban poverty line of US$1.46 per day (Poverties.org, 2011). They were also all Kamba, a minority ethnic group. All were relatively highly educated with at least a secondary school diploma.

Advisory Board members did not collect data themselves, but they offered feedback on data collection techniques to ensure methods were culturally competent. Advisory Board members also explicitly supported the study at the research sites and assisted in recruitment, which were key to building trust with local communities particularly because I am a White, middle-class, American woman. They also promoted a local viewpoint and member-checked the findings, which supported the trustworthiness of the data (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). In addition, by using an Advisory Board this study supports the human right of participation in the research project itself (Sepulveda Carmona, 2013). In return for their participation, Advisory Board members were paid. All members also gained research skills and were given personalized letters of recommendation that explicated their unique work; at least one Advisory Board member gained employment due to his work on this project.

It should be noted that the Advisory Board changed the course of the project. This study was originally designed to explore survival processes during the 2011 drought, the worst drought in over 60 years. All Advisory Board members were highly affected by the drought as they were all forced rural to urban migrants due to lack of water in their home communities. Even so, the Advisory Board and early study participants advocated to include problems they felt were more pressing. This shift speaks to the power of participatory research in supporting validity and trustworthiness, as well as the trust built across the participants, the Advisory Board, and me.

Data collection and sampling methods

To document first-hand accounts of environmental disasters, this study used a phenomenological inquiry approach to explore the shared meanings that underlie the phenomena of study. Phenomenology is ideal to understand common experiences (Padgett, 2008), such as environmental disasters in poor communities. Data sources included field notes, ethnographic interactions and observations, and formal interviews. The flexibility of the data collection adhered to phenomenological standards (Padgett, 2008). Data collection occurred in 19 poor communities in and around Nairobi, Kenya. Communities included urban slums, poor suburbs, and isolated rural communities. Data collection occurred over 6 months as part of a larger study on the impacts of environmental degradation and the community responses. All research methods were approved by a university Institutional Review Board.

Data analysis

I inductively analyzed the data with NVivo for Mac. All data were explored together through three waves of analysis using a phenomenological approach. In this approach, the essence of the shared experience regarding slow violence and disasters was identified as the focus of analysis (Padgett, 2008), rather than a number of other shared experiences, such as poverty in Kenya. In the first wave of analysis, I inductively open-coded all of the data, a process through which I read through the data several times for familiarity, broke the data apart into chunks, and assigned relevant codes to the passages. The chunking process was chosen because of an interest in participants’ experiences, which need significant context (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). In the second wave of analysis, I deductively re-coded all of the data. The recoding was done to both check my interpretation and ensure all of the data were coded in the same way. In the third wave of analysis, I explored linkages across the data through a horizontal analysis. I also conducted comparative analyses (Corbin and Strauss, 2008) where similarities and differences across themes and communities were explored. The findings provide a wholeness of the experience that is embedded in the context (Moustakas, 1994).

Trustworthiness

To support trustworthiness, I followed several methods recommended by Padgett (2008). I documented each step taken in the data collection and analysis to form an audit trail (Padgett, 2008). Data were collected over time, which allowed for multiple contacts with participants in the formal interviews as well as the ethnographic interactions (Padgett, 2008). I also often member-checked themes with the Advisory Board members and participants both in the moment and during analysis in the United States. This process of member-checking supports reflexivity, guards against research bias, and promotes the validity of the data (Padgett, 2008).

The Shauri Moyo Midnight Flood case

To illustrate a typical environmental disaster that the participants described, consider the case of the Shauri Moyo Midnight Flood. On the night of 8 April 2013, the Nairobi River burst its banks without warning, flooding Shauri Moyo, a poor community in the Blue Estate area of Nairobi. Eight survivors told their stories.

In the middle of the night, Dan was awakened by the water in his room: ‘The water was so high, it was like an island. I was just in the middle of the water. And then I heard the sound, the crack.’ He panicked and ran to the main road without saving any of his belongings. Roberto woke and found that the water was several feet high in his room and that his bed was floating. He quickly ran outside and knocked on all his neighbors’ doors. They credited him with their lives.

Corlucka awoke from Roberto’s alerts, and in a confused state, he pulled his roommates out of the house: ‘The water was up to my shoulders.’ He then heard the cracking:

It started at the far end, at Roberto’s house, and it was coming our way … We started getting out and even it didn’t take a second that a wall on the side of the river, it fell into the river.

Boscoe remembers his friends screaming and pulling at him: ‘The house is going! The house is going!’ He was the last person of the complex out of the door. ‘Suddenly when I got out, it collapsed. We lost everything.’

In seconds, their houses collapsed into the Nairobi River. Over 1 year later, the survivors continued to struggle with the impacts of the flood, which they referred to as ‘the tragedy’. In other communities in the area, several people were killed in the flood. The people who lived directly next to the destroyed houses continued to live there. There was a large crack in the foundation on the walkway, just above the river. Corlucka explained, ‘The river is still over there and you can see there is more and more erosion. So, let’s say, every rainfall, we wait for ghosts. More walls will fall down’.

In this case, participants echoed many of the tenants of slow violence. The flood was not a sensational event. It was small, mundane, but dangerous, and restricted to a forgotten slum-based community. Thus, the case of the Shauri Moyo Midnight Flood exemplifies a different kind of environmental disaster than the mega disasters that are typically recognized within the scholarship. Likewise, by focusing on the unique experiences that poor people in developing countries face with disasters throughout the study, I found that they did not describe the large-scale disasters that impact whole communities that are common in the scholarship, such as the Haitian earthquake where over 200,000 people died, the Pakistani floods when the number of people affected reached 17.2 million, tsunamis, devastating earthquakes in China and Iran, or Hurricane Katrina (Alipour et al., 2015; Mathbor and Bourassa, 2012; Pyles and Harding, 2012; Sim and Dominelli, 2016). Rather, participants in this study described smaller everyday events as their main source of environmental suffering, a phenomenon that I term ‘micro disasters’. These were events that fit the definition of disasters, collective stress in a community following hazardous events in which community functioning is impaired (Barton, 1969), but were not included in the scholarship. The participants’ emphases on micro disasters were despite the fact that every participant survived a mega disaster, the 2011 drought, and the older participants told of surviving multiple mega disasters throughout their lives.

After identifying the micro disaster phenomenon, I further explored the concept with participants and the Advisory Board. Several themes emerged that defined the new term. Micro disasters are everyday events, rather than sensational but rare events that impact the entire community. Micro disasters are linked to development and are not supported by formal aid mechanisms, thus leading to deepening poverty.

Everyday life

Scholars who explore slow violence have called for examples in which environmental changes are amorphous, un-dramatic, and hidden, but nonetheless dangerous and deadly (Cock, 2014). This is particularly important because slow violence theorizes that publicized and sensational events are not typical of the types of disasters poor people in developing countries face (Nixon, 2011). This prediction was supported in the data. Micro disasters had an ‘everyday’ feel to them, and thus they were hidden because they were so mundane. As exemplified in the Shauri Moyo Midnight Flood case, urban floods were a common occurrence for people who lived near the Nairobi River. They were so common that despite the fact that people regularly died in these floods, affected communities received no meaningful support from the government or relief organizations because the agencies felt the problems were simply part of life, per the views of the participants. The everyday life theme held for most disasters.

For example, while waste is not a typical exemplar of a disaster, many participants discussed garbage and waste as their primary source of suffering from the environment. Faith, a poor middle-aged housewife, explained,

It is disposal of waste materials, is the biggest problem. You see everywhere you go … The drainage system blocks, it overflows and drains to the river … It is so much unhygienic because there is no sewer … Sometimes you can even see [the elderly] using the river water for living. Instead of buying water, they use that water for their house.

Faith felt that the waste was affecting her, her family, and her neighbors more than catastrophic events, likely because waste was a daily problem with no end in sight.

The abundant waste had severe consequences beyond aesthetics; the spread of disease was a constant worry. Julius, a young unemployed man, explained,

You can find even a diarrhea outbreak, it comes from the slums because the place is not very well kept. There’s an outbreak in the places where the garbages are right close. It affects people that way.

Thus the environmental problem of waste is not the entirety of the issue impacting this population. Rather, the waste exacerbates existing conditions and leads to devastating secondary effects like disease outbreaks.

Participants frequently discussed the deaths of their friends and family members due to micro disasters. Death was directly due to the micro disaster, such as through drowning in flash floods. Death was also due to the secondary effects of micro disasters such as through death from hunger in a drought and death from disease in a flood. Participants also stated a constant fear for the more vulnerable groups within their communities, children and the elderly, due to their higher risk of death from the effects. Thus micro disasters were dangerous and deadly, despite being hidden.

This ‘everyday’ life theme is important. While micro disasters were seemingly not tragic events that typify disasters in the literature, micro disasters were catastrophic for the lives of the participants, who were poor and without sources of formal support. Just as slow violence predicts regarding hidden environmental problems, micro disasters had serious effects, despite the lack of sensationalism.

Lack of development

While literature on disasters tends to differentiate between natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and man-made disasters, such as the refugee crisis, other disaster scholars have argued that there are no natural disasters; because vulnerable people suffer the most in disasters, all disasters are man-made (O’Keefe et al., 1976). This conclusion helps understand micro disasters. Micro disasters were linked to a natural phenomenon such as heavy rains. However, micro disasters became dangerous for the participants because of their lack of development, a man-made problem.

For example, participants in some areas discussed heavy rains that led to death and property destruction because they lived near the river without protective structures in place or in homes that were built with materials that readily washed away. In areas closest to industrial sites, participants discussed pollution as a major problem due to a lack of regulations of industrial processes. In areas with a garbage problem, participants pointed to garbage as a major cause of discomfort, disease, and death due to a non-functioning waste management system. These are all development issues.

While it is often assumed that these problems are not out of the ordinary for people in developing countries, this assumption was unfounded – but only for the wealthy communities. Wealthy communities were inequitably developed and located behind floodwalls, served by functioning waste management systems run by the state, and protected by drainage systems. Uneven development across countries and within developing countries is an unnatural disaster that can be rectified, and in turn decrease vulnerability.

Deepening poverty

Lost assets are common effects of disasters and are barriers to getting back to normal post-disaster (Alipour et al., 2015). Micro disasters were so catastrophic because of the baseline severe poverty in these impacted communities; thus, any lost assets were ruinous. Many in floods lost their houses, as they were either swept away or irreparably damaged. As their houses were lost, so were their assets inside of the houses, which typically took years to accumulate. Antoine, a young electrician, explained the choices he had in a flood: ‘If you have your personal property in the house, you just leave to go with the water. You rescue your family.’

Harvests that were supposed to support a family for an entire year did not materialize during drought-based micro disasters. A middle-aged poor farmer named Ester who made mats and bowls out of grass during drought periods said, ‘There is not even the idea of growing to sell anymore because we can’t even get enough for food. We mostly don’t get anything’. Much of the planting was financed by poor urbanites who sent home all extra money to support the family farms. After a failed harvest, all savings, for both urban and rural family members, were lost. This was particularly painful because while the poor struggled to live through droughts, the relatively wealthy farmers adapted by buying water management technologies and fertilizers to support their income-generating activities. Many participants stressed the wealthy adapted to micro disasters, while the poor could not.

Lost assets that would not ordinarily seem difficult to recover caused long-term disruption. For example, losing documents (a driver’s license, high school degree, secondary degree, identity card) in an urban flood was ruinous. At a cost of US$5–US$15 each, replacing lost documents was an impossible expense. But without these documents, the participants reported they could not compete for employment. Boscoe was a seasonal driver at an international printing company, a job he could no longer do because he lost his license in the Shauri Moyo Midnight Flood. Furthermore, he could not apply for jobs in his desired career area, graphic arts, because he could not prove he graduated college.

In this study, because participants were so poor, when they lost assets they could not undertake adaptive measures like the wealthy could, nor could they pay for things needed for recovery. Participants struggled to buy a sick child medicine, restart their urban business, pay for new housing after a flood, and replant their farm. Many costly measures were often needed at once, which necessitated spending all of their assets to survive, without any left over for recovery. Thus, they spiraled deeper into poverty, which became the new normal. Dan, the young man who fled the Shauri Moyo Flood without saving any of his belongings, explained, ‘Since that day, I don’t even have a house. I don’t know how I can survive so I’m just here. To start again a life is very difficult with nothing’. Like slow violence, micro disasters were threat multipliers for the poor.

No formal support

Disasters require external support to communities due to lack of local capacity to respond independently (Dominelli, 2015; UNISDR, 2007). Because poor communities in developing countries have few resources, this is particularly true for them. However, formal aid delivery is complex and marginalized populations often do not receive what they need (Alipour et al., 2015; Dominelli, 2015), and disasters outside of this traditional understanding, such as war or economic sanctions, do not receive the same support (Harding, 2007). These problems were echoed in the data with regard to micro disasters.

No participant identified sufficient formal support for micro disasters. They felt ignored, which for them was a normal existence as they were quite marginalized due to their poverty and ethnicity. However, many participants also detailed what they felt were injustices related to formal support. Regarding the government, unfairness became apparent during the research time period as there was a major local disaster, albeit a non-environmental disaster, during the same time: the Westgate Mall terrorist attack. The Westgate Mall was located in the wealthiest neighborhood of Nairobi, Westlands; was frequented by the Kenyan elite and expatriates; and was attacked by Al-Shabaab militants. Corlucka, a survivor of the Shauri Moyo Midnight Flood, compared this disaster with the terrorist attack:

If it (a flood) would have happened in Westlands, they (the government) could have taken it seriously. They don’t care about poor people … The rich people don’t need help but the government helps them so much! They are like buddies.

After many years of assumptions that the government could not help him with anything, including supporting his school-aged sister, Corlucka was outraged that the government chose to assist certain groups and ignore other more vulnerable groups. He did not link provided help to the type of disaster (large-scale terrorism versus a small localized flood) but to the social status of the victims.

Feelings of unfairness extended to charities and non-profits as well. Absolute lack of support, as well as manipulation of the disaster for organizational benefit, was common. For example, in one community, a well-known international charity visited after a local flood due to persistent complaints of community members. The charity documented their needs and then did not return as promised. Several weeks later, a funding appeal that distorted the community’s plight appeared on the charity’s website. The community did not receive aid from the charity.

Lack of formal assistance was not unexpected. The Kenyan state disaster management system is not effective (Africa Research Bulletin, 2013). International assistance has also been non-supportive of non-sensationalized events (Harding, 2007). However, lack of assistance is important to document in order to understand the full scope of the impacts of micro disasters.

Micro disasters

Social work research on disasters focuses on large-scale disasters that impact whole communities (Alipour et al., 2015; Gillespie, 2010; Harding, 2007; Liu and Wang, 2015; Mathbor and Bourassa, 2012; Nakhaei et al., 2015; Pyles and Harding, 2012; Sim and Dominelli, 2016; Zakour, 2010). In contrast, participants in this study discussed everyday environmental problems that were linked with lack of development and formal support, and caused deepening poverty, as their primary source of suffering from the environment. This was despite the fact that all of the participants survived mega disasters. While it is documented that socially excluded and marginalized communities suffer more during disasters and are often overlooked during the recovery and rehabilitation phases, I argue that micro disasters are unique from the established disaster scholarship. They were unseen because of their multi-layered hiddenness: disasters were based on hidden sensationless environmental degradation (slow violence) and they impacted hidden populations (the poor in developing countries) without also impacting wealthier groups. These are the disasters that poor people in poor communities in developing countries need support with, which is different from the large-scale disasters that garner most of the disaster response and mitigation attention.

While there are arguments within the literature that encourage inclusivity of different types of disasters, such as refugee crises and war, small disasters that impact only the poorest people are not part of the discussion. This is important to highlight because the participants felt so strongly that these types of disasters caused more suffering for them that they advocated for changing the course of the project, and no participant identified major disasters as their primary problem. The first step to remedying this limitation is by broadening the disaster conceptualization to include micro disasters. With micro disaster inclusion in the literature, responders can begin to develop micro disaster mitigation and response.

Social workers can support communities impacted by micro disasters in many of the same ways that are suggested for other types of disasters with actions that coincide with professional values of global social justice, empowerment, and self-determination. Social workers must empower oppressed groups that are at risk of disasters (Harding, 2007). Affected people, who tend to be in hidden populations, must be listened to. Only then can responses be developed. Relatedly, social workers can support grassroots development (Harding, 2007). As was demonstrated, many of the causes of micro disasters were environmental changes combined with lack of development. This can be addressed with simple development measures that the participants often pointed out: piping water, removing garbage piles once per week, and building protections from the environment like floodwalls near rivers. Social workers could also support client-centered responses and the development of disaster recovery plans (Alipour et al., 2015; Dominelli, 2015). In this study, participants were harmed by micro disasters but most people were surviving. Perhaps social workers could develop a cooperative learning process in which successes could be shared across communities and with formal aid systems. Communities could then learn from each other and formal aid systems could amplify successes to support responses.

Slow violence and micro disasters

This study also adds to the developing theoretical base of slow violence. The concept of slow violence addresses disparate environmental degradation due to poverty, ethnicity, gender, race, and locale in the developing world (Nixon, 2011). Much of Nixon’s analysis addresses why certain communities are the focal points of environmental degradation (their marginalization). This theme was confirmed in the present study. However, in many cases entire poor communities were affected by environmental degradation, but the relatively wealthiest community members (who, to be clear, were usually also poor themselves) in these situations were able to cope and adapt, while the very poorest were not. This was a common scenario, but one that is not explored within the current slow violence scholarship. This nuances Nixon’s (2011) description of communities that are affected by environmental degradation, which are often presented as homogeneous entities. Because slow violence specifically targets hidden environmental degradation impacting invisible people, slow violence would be well served to acknowledge that even within invisible communities, some groups of people are more affected by the environment than others.

Limitations and future research

As is clear in the descriptions of my methods, I relied heavily on the Advisory Board for their local viewpoint and their access to community members. However, this led to lack of diversity in the study. Nearly all of the participants were Kamba. Most participants were male. All participants were young adults or middle-aged. Thus, many questions are left unanswered about the impact of the environment on other vulnerable populations. Future research could be more inclusive of different populations in order to begin comparisons, such as comparing the differing impacts of micro disasters for men and women.

A second avenue for future research explores the relationships between micro disasters and mega disasters. As explained, all participants experienced mega disasters but they preferred to discuss their problems related to micro disasters. This brings up an interesting area for further examination: How are the experiences related? Mega disasters could lead to increased vulnerability to micro disasters or vice versa. Mega disasters may also prepare people to survive micro disasters through learning coping mechanisms. Participants were not asked about this connection in the study, thus it is an area for future exploration.