Dateline ACT

Angola 08/02

Peace brings new hope to Angola's displaced

Luena, Angola, 30 July 2002
by Paul Jeffrey

Belinda Chilombo has been waiting a long time for peace. Chilombo fled her village of Samalenque in the eastern province of Moxico in 1994 and hid in the bush for three years, eating wild leaves and roots to survive. As war raged between government troops and UNITA rebels, Chilombo constantly kept on the move with her husband and five children. When fighting was temporarily interrupted by a 1997 cease-fire, they returned home but had to return to the bush when violence flared again the following year. Three of Chilombo’s children died during her family’s sojourn through the bush.

After cautiously observing this year’s cease-fire from a safe distance, Chilombo and her family came back to their village on June 18, finding only the walls of what was once their mud house. She planted a few seeds she had jealously saved over the years, bringing water from a well two kilometers away. She cut down some small trees to turn into charcoal, which she sells to passing traders on the armament-littered highway near her home. She receives for the charcoal only a fraction of what she could earn in the nearby city of Luena, yet Chilombo is too weak to walk for three days to the market.

What’s the peace dividend for Chilombo? She says she wants her two surviving children to be able to attend school. "They grew up in the bush and don’t know anything but how to run from other people," she said. "I’d like them to learn something else."

While the end of the 27-year civil war has been good news in Angola, peace has revealed the shocking condition of half a million people who were previously inaccessible to international aid groups, trapped behind enemy lines. Suffering from malaria, measles, diarrhea, and a host of other diseases that feast on malnourished bodies, they are dependent on outside assistance, and will remain so for months to come.

"There are two groups of displaced people. Some have been displaced for a while and have received some help, and many of them are ready and able to return home soon," said Victor Balanquete, a relief official with the Evangelical Reformed Church of Angola, a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of churches and church agencies responding to disasters. "It’s the newly emerged families that are simply too weak to go home yet, assuming they have a home to which they can return that isn’t filled with land mines."

While they gain strength for the journey home, the displaced gather in places like Muacanhica, a five-month old camp in Moxico province that held 2,401 families in mid-July. Every day sees new arrivals. Most are internally displaced, though a few families have come to the camp from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they have been living as refugees.

Since March, the families in Muacanhica have received food from the United Nation’s World Food Program. A tent hospital was set up in the middle of the compound by Medicins Sans Frontieres. The Lutheran World Federation (LWF), a member of ACT, has provided Muacanhica residents with what are known in relief circles as "non-food items," including kitchen kits, plastic tarps, buckets, clothing, seeds and tools. ACT/LWF has also installed two wells for the camp with two additional wells scheduled for completion.

Social workers from ACT/LWF provide recreational activities for children in the camp, as well as individual counseling and other assistance for children who are orphans or suffering psychological trauma from the war.

ACT/LWF also provides special assistance to the 1,606 families in the camp that are single-parent headed by women, or otherwise identified by staff as particularly vulnerable. They receive assistance in building their simple grass houses, and their children get porridge and other supplemental food.

ACT/LWF is assisting 15,000 displaced families in the war-torn eastern provinces of Moxico and Lunda Sul. Some of these are returning home, hoping to find seeds to plant before the rains begin in September. Others need still to recover from the ravages of war in the safety of camps like Muacanhica.

According to Moises Gourgel, the ACT/LWF coordinator for Moxico, the displaced families arrive at the emergency settlements devastated by their experiences. "They are broken, suffering, and vulnerable. They continue being victims even though the war is over," he said. "Our task is not just to feed them, but to help them return to some sort of sustainable lifestyle. We don’t want to create dependence, but rather help them get to the point where they can survive in the future without assistance, when they can be reintegrated back into the larger society with their dignity recognized both by themselves and by others."

Gourgel said ACT/LWF works with the displaced on identifying and meeting priority needs. "We provide them with some materials they couldn’t obtain locally, but it is they who solve their own problems. That’s essential if they are to recover the dignity they often lost when they were forced to flee their homes and fields," said Gourgel.

Many of the displaced have a huge struggle ahead of them. Linda Mosango arrived in Muacanhica in mid-July after spending a month in a church-run temporary shelter in Luena. She not only lost her husband and two of her five children during the war. She lost a leg and part of a hand when she stepped on a land mine in August of last year. "I don’t know how things are going to turn out" she says, a small child clinging to her one leg, "life is going to be different for me in the future. Yet we’re at peace, finally. In peace a lot of things are possible."