Letters from Overseas

February 2008

The flood sweeps over me…. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.

Psalm 69:2–3

For the second year in a row, we've arrived back from time in Canada to erratic weather that comes from rapid climate change: severe flooding in the Zambezi river basin where we live. In the districts where the Christian Council works, in 13 emergency camps there are 54,000 people who have fled from the waters, their crops all flooded and lost, 2/3 of the homes destroyed, the rest severely damaged. A quarter of these people are women who are sole heads of families.

Government records say it's the worst Zambezi flood since 1976, and the rains are still falling and people still fleeing. Old people can't remember from ever before two consecutive flood-years. Even worse, these floods began a month earlier than the time of normal heaviest rainfall, and destroyed many more crops than would normally be the case, because normally people could harvest at least a part of their corn, millet, and sweet potato crops before the heaviest rains descend.

Since no one expected flooding after last year's floods, some people were unprepared. Many fled saving nothing but their lives and canoes, losing household goods, fishing nets, poultry, and everything else. In the camps they built tiny shelters of grass, but these can't keep out rain or mosquitoes. Some have gone five days without food. They aren't idle. Men and boys cut forked sticks to make slingshots for hunting rabbits, borrowing a machete from anyone who salvaged one from their abandoned home. But life-threatening problems abound. The water is polluted; there is diarrhea and a risk of cholera. There is malaria. Crocodiles are disoriented, carried far from their normal riverbank sites by the surges of water and terrorizing the camps' inhabitants.

Like the psalmist, they are indeed waiting, and their hopes, if not their eyes, are dimming. If God is coming, it's in the form of emergency helpers. Where CCM is working there are no other aid organizations. CCM's first priority is food and plastic sheets, mosquito nets, and after, replacement seeds and fishing nets. In some of these camps, CCM had already dug wells, to serve the people who settled there after last year's floods. Now there are new refugees, and more need for clean water. Some of the wells are dug and lined but still without the hand-pumps mounted; the early rains caught the builders with work unfinished. As soon as water levels go down and let trucks pass, an urgent need will be to send in pumps and mount them, so the people can have clean water.

So much remained undone since last year's floods. While waiting for their harvests—the harvests now destroyed—the people had been eating subsistence food rations supplied by CCM through the World Food Program's food-for-work plan. Men and women with hoes—the women with babies on their backs—have been building access roads to the new post-flood communities. Those roads, now not flooded, are the route for emergency relief.

In Mozambique, the seventh-poorest country in the world, development is a long, hard process. Flood emergencies mean steps backwards for any steps forward. God is helping, but can only do that through faithful hard-working people—those clobbered by the floods, and those like the CCM workers called to help them.

In mission and service,

Karen and Bill Butt

Karen and Bill Butt are United Church of Canada Overseas Personnel serving with Conselho Cristao de Mocambique in Mozambique. The work of this ecumenical partner and the work of overseas personnel are made possible through your gifts to the Mission and Service Fund of The United Church of Canada.