When the Floods Came: Two decades ago, El Nino destroyed my childhood home in Ecuador. It was a sign of things to come.

• Author: Flores, Stephanie

In 1998, I was an eleven-year-old child growing up on the coast of Ecuador. I had no knowledge of the term "climate change," but that didn't stop my family and me from experiencing its devastating effects. We endured the rage of El Fenomeno del Nino, a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that influences global weather events and that has been getting worse since the 1970s due to the impact of the Earths rising temperature.

I had never seen so much rain before. It continued pouring and flooding and, ultimately, it altered my life forever.

It was 3 a.m., and it had been raining all night. I woke up to the sound of running water and found that my small room was full of it--brown, thick, smelly water that touched the mattress I was sleeping on. To this day, I can still remember the awful sewage-like odor.

As I waded through the river that used to be my house, my mom was in the living room desperately trying to bail us out with a bucket. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. I could see how powerless she felt as waves of water continued to pour through our front door. Her efforts to save our belongings failed. After a couple of hours, the foul water was waist-high inside our home.

My mom grabbed a bag with some of my clothes and called a friend who lived in a middle-class neighborhood on higher ground and agreed to watch me until the water went down. Outside, the streets had transformed into a dirty sea so high that my mom had to carry me on her back. I was terrified yet also angry that she had to face the flooding alone while I was going to be in a dry, comfortable place.

The flood damage worsened as we walked through poorer neighborhoods. Natural disasters like El Fenomeno del Nino often hit the poor hardest. Even before the flooding, my neighborhood had a sewage problem because the government neglected to invest in or maintain our infrastructure. Now that neglect was turning into devastation.

Days passed before the water went down. We lost many of our possessions, including our family photo albums. We had to find a new place to live, away from our old friends, community, and neighborhood. I was devastated.

Around 30,000 people in Ecuador became homeless in the aftermath of the 1998 El Fenomeno del Nino and many children suffered from infectious diseases due to the floods and standing water. This was one of the three El Nifios since the 1970s deemed a "super" El Nino due to the strength and devastation of its impact. The 2015 El Nino...