[ad_1]
BUZI, Mozambique – We did not know his name or even his face. But in the middle of the grim scene of a village devastated by the hurricane, the little boy stood out because he danced.
He walked the muddy street of Buzi to the sound of music that he could not hear, unaware of the suffering that surrounded him, at least for a while. He was barefoot and in muddy shorts. He was probably wearing the only clothes he had left.
Like many children in the wake of Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, he was alone. But it seemed to have a destination, which put it far ahead of most others.
It was almost certainly directed to an improvised shelter or concrete floor of a school, now full of wet linen, cooking fires and displaced people.
Life was dangerous. In one school, another little boy was lying against a door, dozing near a pile of ashes still hot.
Hundreds of thousands of uprooted lives, including many children, were scattered by the March 14 storm. The houses were washed away by rivers from the treetops.
The survivors said that they opened the doors of their house to water that came to their necks. They ran to reunite their families and rushed to the rooftops.
They stayed there, sometimes for days. They drank the water around them, as dirty as she was, to stay alive.
On a roof, a woman gave birth. The baby has lived.
Finally, in some cases, a helicopter appeared. He dropped biscuits to eat. And this made an immediate and painful decision: who to save first?
Some families were torn apart when women or children, or wounded, were taken away.
More than two weeks after landing the cyclone, there remains a soggy landscape characterized by disconnection and grief.
Phones ring or barely wink, if at all. The Internet service has been interrupted and is only returning now with the help of emergency responders.
In glimmerings of hope, people spotted the highest points of the flat landscape waving cell phones in the air: a three-story building in Buzi. Highway bridge in the city of Beira, which has 500,000 inhabitants and is now 90% destroyed.
Those who could not find a signal were discouraged by the possibility of finding their missing relatives.
Officials who are in a hurry to have an estimate of the number of missing persons do not even try. Even the death toll, now over 700 in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, is described as very preliminary. This may never be known.
The figures proposed by the humanitarian agencies have become blurred. Some 1.8 million people are in urgent need. Nearly 136,000 displaced people in the single most affected country. More than 50,000 houses have been destroyed.
In the port city of Beira, fishing boats arrived one by one on the beach, carrying survivors ashore from Buzi and other places.
The children were grouped together, wet and disoriented, until aid workers chased them from the back of a pickup truck. They were destined for one of the many impromptu IDP camps, probably a school.
The living conditions in the camps are often dark, with little drinking water, sanitation or medical supplies. A cholera outbreak has begun and is gaining momentum.
In the midst of chaos, families are always looking for children, parents, spouses, often in vain.
Survivors stood on Beira Beach and watched the fishing boats arrive, looking for a familiar face in the crowd.
Zacarias Mauta was alone. He came from Buzi, where he survived by climbing a tree. Four days later, a helicopter seized him and brought him to Beira, a city he had never seen before.
He wants to reunite with his family, including four children under 6 years old. He hopes that they were also taken to Beira, but he does not know it.
"I wanted to hold my family but I could not," he said about their separation in the storm. "I was also in danger."
Maybe he will find an acquaintance who knows his destiny. Perhaps he will find work in an unknown city to be able to continue searching for him. Maybe the government will help.
The cyclone learned it, he said, "It's no longer safe anywhere."
___
Follow the news from Africa at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
[ad_2]
Source link
