Mozambique floods unleash children's fears

Mennonite Central Committee
Sunday, 25 March 2001

LIBERTAD, Mozambique — The rain started in the afternoon, 13-year-old Regina Miamu said. At night it rained again and this time the water came "rushing through with force," she said. In darkness the 30 young girls at the Center for Homeless Girls started moving what belongings they could gather to a vocational training school down the road where others in the community had gathered to escape rising flood waters.

Nearly a month and a half later, by mid-March, the ground around the center was still saturated as the rains, not nearly as torrential as earlier in February, refused to let up. The flood robbed the children of the security of their home. It also swept away their personal items, school materials, Bibles, clothing and furniture.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) with its Mozambican partner, the Christian Council of Mozambique (CCM), will distribute school/health kits to the girls center in the upcoming weeks, replacing at least some of the items they lost. MCC and CCM are planning to distribute nearly 17,000 school/health kits to school children who are without schools or their schools have been damaged.

More than 200,000 school children in nearly 700 schools have been affected by the flood throughout southern Mozambique, according to CCM relief worker, Virgilio Mahuai. Overall 1 million people have been affected by the floods with 300,000 displaced from their homes.

For the school girls, however, more was lost than their school materials, according to the center's coordinator, Natala Simiao."As the girls were in the past living with fear (as street children) they have been living with fear again, now we have the flood," Simiao said. Most of the girls arrive at the center from the street, having fled abusive family situations, or their parents have died and they were rejected by a step-parent.

"I work with a woman in the church, one who is a nurse and knows a lot about the psychology of children," she said. The nurse came to the center to help the girls understand the situation they were in. "She came to give them advice, to encourage them that this (the flooding) did not happen just to them, but to a lot of people," she said.

Still, for many of the girls it will take time to overcome the trauma of the flood.

"I was scared," Lucia Isabel, 13, said. "The house was full of water, things were ruined."

"The water came at us with things in it, I was afraid we were going to die," Regina Miamu said.

"Our blankets on the beds were on the water, we were all frightened," Elina Alson, 13, added.

Now when it rains the girls are scared the floods will come again, Natala Simiao said.

For more information, or to contact Mennonite Central Committee, see their website at: www.mcc.org