"You can't die before you have lived"

A group of 11 women sit around a shallow and wide hole, dug out from the red sandy soil outside the Canicado town warehouse. They are having a heated discussion about something important enough for them not to notice that the sun is about to set and that they soon have to head home. The topic is food and how it was distributed that day. The women are part of a team that hands out food and tools in Guija and Mabalane districts in the Gaza province of Mozambique.

They have seen busy days in the past two months. The villages in the two districts had been cut off for a few months and are still receiving food aid six months after the floods.

Lutheran World Federation (LWF), a member of the ACT alliance, in cooperation with World Food Programme, is distributing food to the worst affected areas. Each family receives a 30-day ration of maize, cooking oil and nutritional biscuits for children and pregnant women.

Food was, that day, distributed in Xirarara village, some 4km from the warehouse in Canicado Town. People here did not see an ounce of food aid before the month of June. Days like this are rare for food is distributed once a month. Women and children arrange themselves in little groups and wait in line to receive maize, cooking oil, beans and nutritional supplements.

For Regina Joao Machaieie a day like this is comes as a relief. The food might not last long but this day brings to end the screams and lethargy of children, if only temporarily. To her three children, this day "is better than yesterday as they can concentrate better at school if they have food."

Regina carries the look of patience; of someone who in the last six months has come to know life as being difficult. Her house stands alone amongst uprooted trees with hardly any belongings inside. The two new pots and axe stand out in contrast to the dusty surroundings. They look out of place in that environment that was denuded by the devastating waters of the Limpopo River. Some days there is hardly any food to put in those shiny pots.

" My life is slowly changing because we have at least something to put under the nose. As my husband and all my adult sons are working in the mines in South Africa, I have always had to take care of the family alone. This is difficult as a woman, as you have to ask permission from someone who is hundreds of kilometres away."

There is an air of resilience about this mother of six, whose life has been spent struggling to make ends meet. She continues with a sigh explaining how her life has always revolved around securing food and looking after the livestock. Now, she has no livestock to oversee as her herd of ten cattle and five goats was washed away during one long miserable night.

As Regina Joao Machaieie puts it: "I have never had a nice life to start with but now things are getting better. That the food we receive is not enough is something we cannot do anything about. Unfortunately, we can’t even try our hands at any business, as there is nothing left and everything has become so expensive. But that doesn’t mean we must stop living. You can’t die before you have lived."

" It pains me to look at people who have some livestock left because in the rush of finding refuge, I didn’t even manage to save one goat. I have the energy to build a new house but without cattle I cannot transport building material." Regina would have to walk some 10 km to collect grass for thatching and to fell trees for making poles.

"It is not difficult to build a house but with the cost of transportation being so high, I am really caught between a rock and a hard place. Even traditional transport has become expensive because there are hardly any cattle left," she says shaking her head whilst pointing at the neighbour’s well-fed herd of cattle. The high demand for any form of transportation has meant that those who still own livestock can insist on any price. If you have nothing with which to exchange then the power to bargain is limited.

The most devastating consequence of the floods is the destruction of crops on which people in Gaza depend. This province, the ‘basket of Mozambique’, provided vegetables, maize and rice to a third of the country. Now, 16 000 people depend on food aid for their survival. They will continue to do so until the harvest is good and the roads are repaired. Low-scale farmers have been left with no form of livelihood with their only hope being a good harvest.

How people in these two districts managed to survive for such a long period with limited outside help is remarkable. Whilst relief workers were, for three months, struggling to find ways of reaching the two districts, those villagers who did not make to the aid camps were left to scrounge around for rotting maize. What compounded the misery is that the floods struck a few weeks before harvest time.

"People have coping mechanisms, if they had waited for help to arrive they would have died", Aly Dieadionne, the Food Aid Manager with LWF, explains. "They have an amazing sense of sharing and that’s why they survived without any outside help for so long."

As one relief worker oversees the off-loading of hundreds of maize sacks, a group of enthusiastic women scramble about him, shouting, "if you were a politician we would vote for you because you brought the one thing that will make us sleep easy for the next few weeks."

Praying for a good harvest

The challenge now is to secure food for the thousands of affected people whose food source was devastated. Some villages that were the first recipients of maize and bean seeds are already harvesting. They complain that the yield is not as good as usual because of the thick silt on the surface. The silt is compact and dry thus preventing roots from stretching out into moist soil.

Amid all the destruction, the only good things about the floods are the increase in fish and good grazing. Fish are trapped in pools that have been created by the force of the water as it was searching for outlets from the river. For those whose livestock was saved, abundance in grass has ensured a healthy recovery. People await a better harvest next year by which time they expect the silt to have been absorbed into the soil making it richer and fertile. "We are all praying to get a boom harvest. It is the only hope we have. If it’s good then we can sell the surplus. We can start afresh again," explains Regina.

It is yet to be seen whether the products can be sold since many roads still remain unusable. This stops traders from the big towns from purchasing the well sought-after vegetables; the only viable form of livelihood for most Mozambicans. The demand at the local level has decreased because "money is hard to come by and everyone is growing the same types of vegetables," Regina laments.

Growers are burdened with piles of vegetables they cannot consume. As a result they are forced to give them away to their extended families or to anyone who has none.

Women go out to fish almost on a daily basis for no one can afford meat anymore. They often return with a catch. In the shallow pools, they do not even have to use fishing rods; they walk in hip-deep water with small reed nets. In other pools, they dip their capulanas (sarongs) a mere half-a-metre’s depth and scoop the fish up. The fish will at least provide the necessary nutrients that the food aid cannot cover.

As Regina Joao Machaieie puts it: "I have never had a nice life to start with but now things are getting better. That the food we receive is not enough is something we cannot do anything about. Unfortunately, we can’t even try our hands at any business, as there is nothing left and everything has become so expensive. But that doesn’t mean we must stop living. You can’t die before you have lived."

Food - a source of conflict

The criteria used to choose the recipients of food aid are sometimes a source of friction between villagers. It is reported that one village turned the food away as people could not understand why only those who had lost houses should receive food aid. According to the village elders, food should have been given to everyone regardless of what was lost to the floods. In many areas, food was given out only to those who lost their houses although everyone had lost crops - their source of food and income.

An unfortunate oversight of the earlier food distribution process was that salt was not given out in many areas. It is like the Sahara here. Salt has become a jewel. Regina Machaieie’s family has been forced to sell a fraction of the food they received in exchange for salt. "We could survive for the first month without salt but then after a while, the thought of eating tasteless food was unbearable. Imagine food without salt," she exclaims.

Asked why they do not move to higher ground so as to avoid destruction in the future, the response is the same from everyone. "This is our ancestral land, we can’t just leave like that. Besides that, it is common practice to have two fields, one in the valley close to the river and another on higher ground. We prefer the lower lying fields, as their yield is higher due to the fertile soil and abundance of water."

Fotos taken by Jesper Milner Henriksen