Mozambique Floods: Nightmares into Dreams

By Elaine Eliah, ACT

   "If it's a straw house, I don't have a husband to help me with upkeep," worries Salma Augusto Mathe. "If this concrete could fall, what about straw?"

   Salma stood in the midst of wreckage pointing to the green and blue concrete slabs lying at her feet. Those toppled remains were hardly identifiable as pieces of a house that might every have sheltered a family. Judging from the blank look that shot across Salma's face, those hunks of concrete she pointed at were not only significant pieces of her world, but the very foundation of life as she and her family knew it.

   In Trevo, once a vibrant residential community in Maputo, people still sweep the streets. Music blares from someone's radio as people cook and take their meals. Clothes hang on bushes and trees and dogs doze on a mattress left to dry in the sun. Two men play checkers with bottlecaps while nearby someone has her hair plaited. All this will stop at dusk when everyone returns to temporary shelters elsewhere.

   Even after living in Trevo for nearly forty years, Salma wouldn't spend another night there even if she had a house to come home to. "Now even if there is any little rain I'm afraid ' after what I've seen." What Salma saw when she awoke at four a.m. was water already swirling around her bed. "I was quite asleep. I awoke to the house cracking. Water was already in. I watched clothing and articles washing away. My neighbor Manuel Tchauke knows how to swim. He pulled her and the children out one by one and helped the family reach safety.

Trevo in February after the floods first came.

   Manuel was lucky. Water swirling around his straw home was only about knee deep. He had to wade into considerably deeper water to rescue his neighbors. Salma won't have to stay in Trevo any longer. She and her family have been offered a building plot in a newly planned community. This suburb of Maputo will be known as Congolote and will become the new home for 1500 families that lost their homes to flooding in the Mozambican capital last month.

   "I want to be in a place where I will never see water again," Salma said. "I can go anywhere but I don't want to stay at the same level."

   Congolote is certainly at higher altitude than the informal settlement area of Trevo was. The city of Maputo has already demarcated 15m x 30m plots for 3000 families and has drilled at least a couple boreholes for new residents. There are already about fifty families living there in tents the municipality provided and one of these tents has already been turned into an informal market.

   Many families are ready to be transported to their new home sites as soon as plot numbers are assigned. There is little in the way of available building materials in the Congolote area and many fear that they may have little to call home for some time. When they move, they'll take with them plastic sheeting and cooking kits, part of the shipments that arrived in three planeloads from DanChurchAid. They'll take with them the memories of heroes like Manuel. Salma will even carry her fourteen chickens that escaped to the trees when the waters came.

   Salma's daughter will also take her latest surprise, a baby girl born just one week after the nine-month pregnant woman had to flee her home in the middle of the night. The family chose the name 'Sheila' for the little girl - to remind them of 'Cheia,' the Portuguese for 'Flood.'

March 10, 2000

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