Xai Xai, Mozambique (dpa) – “Please don’t forget us, we have only just started living again,” says Marta Flora Mabessa as she takes visitors through the tent school.
She leads them past the newly-planted banana trees and shows them the lavatories donated to the new settlement that has arisen in the wake of the Mozambique floods.
Here at Ndambine 2000 (Flood 2000), as the settlement has been named, she is simply expressing what countless Mozambicans feel seven months after floods devastated the southeast African country.
“Thanks to foreign assistance we now have a roof over our heads once more, but there is still lots to do,” she says.
Along with 4,600 others from the low-lying areas around Xai Xai, Mabessa has found a new home for herself at Ndambine.
Hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans were driven out of their village homes when the floods swept through vast swathes of the country in February and March. According to official figures, 700 died.
“Whatever emergency measures could be taken, in particular with regard to secure accommodation for the million people affected, were taken before the rainy season started,” says Ben Henson, United Nations Children’s Fund coordinator for Gaza Province, where the floods took their worst toll.
Some 160,000 people will need urgent food aid at least until March 2001, he says.
“It is by no means the case that reconstruction is proceeding as well everywhere as it is in Ndambine,” Henson says, pointing to huge problems with providing drinking water, sanitation and infrastructure in general.
The country’s most important north-south road that runs through Xai Xai was opened only at the beginning of October, and the sewage system in the town still has not been repaired.
Many houses still stand empty. The high-water mark of the Limpopo can be read off four metres up their walls.
Little remains of the small shops, the restaurants and the town’s bank, apart from wrecked rooms behind barred windows.
“The mud was up to the ceiling, all the tables and chairs were destroyed,” says the owner of one of the few cafes to have reopened in the town.
Most settlements anywhere near the river, now flowing past quietly along its normal course, suffered a similar fate. In the middle of the devastated landscape a tent town has grown up, from where the inhabitants stream out on the long road to fetch water.
The first rains have begun to fall, but the ground is unable to take any more. Roads become streams in minutes, but Henson says there is no immediate fear of renewed floods.
The catastrophe, which hit around two million people, according to Unicef figures, was a huge setback for Mozambique, where recovery had been proceeding well after 16 years of civil war.
Since the floods the aid organizations have had to revert to providing the basics. After delivering emergency supplies by air during the flooding itself, they are now doing their utmost to reduce the suffering, providing drinking water, improving sanitation and conducting innoculation campaigns.
Thus far there have been no major epidemics. In Gaza Province alone 15,000 families have been accommodated in new settlements.
“For some people things are better than before the flood, but one should not forget that they have lost everything, including the villages that were their homes,” Henson says.
He adds that it will be years before the country will be able to resume the upward course it was on before the floods struck.
