Mozambique: Floods washed roads and bridges away

 "I stand here with my radio, the only possession I managed to salvage from the roof before the water swallowed my house", Fernando Sitoe says. He is one of 28000 people who were for months stranded without food on the northern side of the Limpopo River in the Gaza Province in southern Mozambique after torrential floods had struck the country in February and March.

"I moved some of my belongings up to the roof thinking that the water would not rise to that level. I watched from the tree with tears in my eyes as the water consumed the house removing any evidence of its existence. I have already erected one house but now I have to build a second one for my 14 children, one is not enough," Fernando Sitoe explains while pointing to his one roomed mud house on thin shaky columns that is covered with plastic.

"I don’t think we will go hungry for a while," says Fernando with a satisfied smile whilst making a gesture indicating the area covered by his fields. Had one met Fernando six months ago, he would have recounted different details. Those were the times of starvation when hunger stricken villagers rummaged around inundated grain storages in hope of finding something to eat. "We received food too late", Fernando says pointing out that they could not be reached by road.

To allot food aid is not easy for relief organizations when bridges and roads are destroyed and vast areas are turned into islands. This impels one to come up with creative solutions to reach areas where people like Fernando live to support them with the much-needed food, seeds and kitchen implements. That was the challenge the staff of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), a member of the ACT alliance, faced in Gaza Province in the months of June and July.

The immensely forceful current that swept away everything in its path washed all the connecting roads and bridges in the province away. Tarred roads have turned into dirt tracks while bridges lay shattered leaving vast areas inaccessible. The government estimates that 620 miles of road will have to be rebuilt. The rail line connecting Mozambique and Zimbabwe has taken the hardest knocking. Now all that remains of it are the bent and crooked tracks that resemble a roller coaster.

Necessity resulted in the creation of a barge to ferry relief supplies across the 500 metres stretch of water. The districts of Guija and Mabalane, north of the Limpopo River, had been isolated for 3 months after the floods and people had only received minimal food aid from the airdrops in the early periods of the emergency. The LWF had the challenging task of reaching about 20 000 people who had neither food nor clean water and were in desperate need of medicine to fight cholera and malaria.

The barge, a 4x3m structure, was made from drums donated by several organizations and put together by 4 staff members of LWF. Previously, all relief supplies to Guija and Mabalane were transferred over a distance of 800 km. It took 5 days to drive for a truck with a load of 30 tons. Had the bridges been in working condition, a drive across the Limpopo would have taken no longer than 10 minutes.

Philip Tonks, an agriculturist with LWFdescribes the work before the barge was made as gruelling. "In the beginning, we moved supplies to a road closest to the river and then we had to carry them for about 3km to two dinghies that would then ferry them across. Carrying 50kg of maize on your head for a lengthy distance is not easy especially when there are hundreds of tons still to be moved," explains Phillip Tonks shaking his head at the thought of the amount of work they had to do and the conditions they were faced with. This dragged the process of distribution to a sluggish 20 tons a day, well below the required 7000 tons. The barge can transport 70 tons a day. It takes a mere 5 minutes to cross the river and it is now possible to transport bulky equipment for use in well cleaning and drilling projects.

Philip Tonks says with a smile "when we were constructing the barge, people were very sceptical. They did not believe that the device would float but when it was put out on water for the first time and they saw how smooth it was floating downstream, then everyone scrambled to jump on."

The barge is used to link the towns of Canicado and Chokwe but other areas remained inaccessible as the main bridge at Macarratane was torn to pieces. Residents were, for 3 months, forced to walk on a flimsy wooden staircase that was put up as a temporary measure. They also had to contend with moving bulky goods on a small rope up a vertical of 6m. The fear was that the stairs would not hold for long with 600 people crossing during peak hours and 200 during off-peak hours. In response, ACT-LWF mounted a 4-metre steel staircase to alleviate the problem of access and to minimise possible accidents. It makes transportation smooth, allowing people to move heavy goods such as charcoal and wood.

"Even if it takes years before the bridge is repaired, we now have at least means of crossing to the other side. This means that we can go to the markets and town. This means a lot for those of us who depend on selling vegetables and fruit," Domingos Machaka, a local farmer, says.

Fotos taken by Pamela Zintatu Ntshango and LWF GAZA