Alex Wynter in Buzi, Mozambique
Mozambican marines and Red Cross boat volunteers were this weekend taking advantage of an apparent break in the rains upstream in the Buzi river system to hone their aquatic-rescue skills.
The Mozambique Red Cross (MRC) and a marine detachment led by Lieutenant Eurico Iyale, 43, have between them ferried a total of 1,117 riverside villagers to safety on higher ground at the resettlement centres of Guara Guara and Bandua in recent weeks.
Readings gathered by local government officials show water levels in the Buzi itself and the two rivers that feed it, the Lucite and the Revue, began to fall last week.
“But we’re worried about malaria and diarrhoea in the resettlement areas,” said MRC branch president Paulo Inacio Maguanda, 52, “and we have to be ready for the next batch of heavy rain which is forecast for February.”
The MRC has boat teams in four flood-affected provinces: Manica, Sofala, Tete and Zambezia. But they are desperately short of spare parts and engines.
Asked what he would most like from the regional appeal just launched by the International Federation, Inacio Maguanda says: “Send us outboards”.
The military and the MRC believe that, for the moment, they have moved everybody in imminent danger – there have been no deaths reported in the floods along the rivers they patrol.
Money and training
But it’s not easy. “Sometimes we have to go back as many as five times to persuade people to leave,” says MacDonald Tonderai Gassane, a 26-year-old volunteer. “They can be very reluctant to leave their plots and the place where their ancestors are buried.
“We find them sitting on their roofs, or sometimes up to their chests in water, not quite sure what to do.”
There is no compulsion.
Were it not for this aquatic rescue capability along the Buzi and other swollen Mozambican rivers, the death toll from floods already worse than 2000 in terms of water levels would again number in the hundreds.
But it takes money and constant training to maintain.
The team in Buzi, where the MRC trains all its aquatic-rescue teams, recently had to send an outboard to Machanga, a coastal town some 150 kilometres to the south, where the flooding was judged to be worse. They only managed to replace it over the weekend.
Driving to Buzi along the 80-kilometre gravel road off the main highway that leads from Beira to Harare, it’s hard to believe anyone could think the worst was over. The road, crumbling badly at the edges, is cut every few hundred metres by streams of flood water. It looks as if one good downpour would finish it off.
But the boat rescuers of Buzi are drawing breath, catching up on their training, and preparing for what they expect to be a much worse dousing in February.
“This area is like a funnel,” says Sergio Moiane, the local administrator, whose headquarters contains the flood coordination and information-gathering centre.
“We know for sure that when the level at Dombe, our main measuring station upstream on the Lucite, gets to 5.5 metres, we will be flooded three days later. That’s how long it takes the water to get here.”
Proudest boast
Says Inacio Maguanda: “When the alarm is sounded for real we sometimes start with a convoy, using some of the small passenger boats moored nearby. The Red Cross goes first with a megaphone, warning people to get ready.”
The teams can be away upriver for three days at a time.
One factor that has worsened the impact of recent floods, according to local people, is that a stretch of embankment built during Portuguese rule has fallen into disrepair, and river water is now free to engulf settled areas.
No one can remember exactly how many people died in Buzi in 2000: the truth, it seems, is that they prefer not to think about it.
But it’s equally apparent they’re determined it won’t happen again.
The Red Cross aquatic-rescue team in Buzi is talked about locally for another reason: it contains 26-year-old Pascoa Joaquim, reputedly the only woman in the village who can swim – by all accounts her proudest boast.