Umdloti sisters take to crowdfunding after home damaged by floods

Sisters Janelle and Bianca Barnard, like many others, have been forced to pick up the pieces after the most recent flood devastated their Umdloti home, taking with it all they had left of their parents.

What was supposed to be a birthday weekend away for Janelle with her sister in the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Park, instead turned into a mad race home to see what they could salvage on May 21.

The sisters recall the weather warning issued just before the weekend, but were not concerned since they suffered very little damage during the April floods.

“The drive back was the craziest thing. By then I heard my partner’s mom, Free Haine, had been evacuated, the windows of our home broken and the home itself flooded with mud,” she said.

Haine was house-sitting for the sisters.

They raced home in perfectly clear weather, in stark contrast to what would greet them around midnight when they entered Bellamont Road.

In the three days that followed, the two sisters dug through the mud searching for treasured items which represented the last living memories of their mother who they lost unexpectedly in 2019.

“Twenty-eight years of treasured memories were destroyed and swept away in less than 24 hours. We are trying to hold everything together as best as we can, but we are just two and the burden is becoming too heavy to carry on our own,” the sisters wrote on a Back-a-Buddy page created to raise funds to help them pick up the pieces.

The target is R200 000, and by Tuesday this week they had raised just over R97 200.

Their pets – five cats, a dog and a parrot – could not be evacuated with Haine, but were all later found except one cat, Jinx.

Sadness turned to joy three days later when Bianca was trying to salvage what she could from her bedroom when they heard a faint ‘meow’ from inside a sliding cupboard surrounded by mud.

It was Jinx, who obviously used one of his nine lives to survive.

Bianca, currently busy with the second half of her Masters degree in clinical psychology, suffered a further blow when the laptop on which her thesis was stored was swept away.

“But what’s really sad is that irreplaceable family heirlooms and photo albums are now submerged under the mud.”

One of the handful of items Bianca managed to salvage was a prophetic note her sister wrote to her before the flood. It read: “Trust yourself, you’ve already survived so much, and you will survive whatever is coming.”

To help them with their fundraising initiative, visit backabuddy.co.za/champion/project/help-bianca-and-janelle.

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