Gallery: Old-Timer Joins Instagram, Schools Everyone With Poignant Flood Photos
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*A man falls back into the flood waters.*
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*A man and woman stand in waist-high water for a portrait.*
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*Mendel had a police escort during some of his time in Nigeria.*
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*A boy sweeps the last of the water from a room.*
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*Traditional healer Joseph Edem and his wife Endurance stand with children Godfreedom, aged 10, and Josephine, 12, in front of their Igobeni house. The family says the floods were sudden. "I thought we were going to die," says Josephine. "I don’t know where many of my friends are because water also entered their house."*
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*Ratmas Ebiarohon, pictured washing himself in floodwaters in Igbogeni, says the floods came “without stop." “My whole house was covered. I am a furniture maker, and it destroyed all my equipment — my generator, my spray machine, my jigsaw. Now I am totally down. I do not know what to do. The value of what I lost is about 4.5m naira \[$28,550; £17,800\].”*
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*A young woman strides through floodwaters on her way to church on a Sunday morning in Igbogeni. Many areas of Bayelsa state in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta region have been flooded, including Otuoke, the home village of President Goodluck Jonathan.*
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*Children wait in line for bread at Igbogeni Camp 9, which houses around 500 people in canvas tents.*
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*Isaac Deruy is a photographer in Sampou village. He is holding the damaged photograph of his grandfather that he rescued as his house was flooded. His grandfather Umoru Bomba, 86, had given him the print to copy for him, the only copy the family had.*
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