Via The New York Times: Mozambique, Battered by Cyclone, Takes Stock: ‘It’s All Rotten’.
TICA, Mozambique — Hundreds of villagers labored under a blazing sun on Thursday to salvage what they could from cornfields that just days earlier were submerged by storm-driven floodwaters.
With the waters from Cyclone Idai starting to recede, it was time to take stock, and in Tica, a central Mozambique village where many of the residents are subsistence farmers, the news was not good. Homes, clothes and crops — all vanished.
“Everything we have is gone,” said Armindo Fernando Lazaro, 52, a father of eight who was taking shelter at the Muda Mufo Complete School.
For aid agencies, the water’s retreat allowed better access to scores of communities that had been cut off by the cyclone, which hit last Thursday, and by the floods that followed.
Agencies were shifting their focus away from search-and-rescue operations to providing food and supplies, said Caroline Haga, a spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ relief team in central Mozambique.
“Floods are receding quite quickly,” Ms. Haga said. “If things continue like this, we might no longer be in a situation where people are in danger.” She cautioned, however, that the weather could change.
The cyclone struck Mozambique before continuing on to Zimbabwe and Malawi, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
At a news conference Thursday, Celso Correia, Mozambique’s land and environment minister, said the country’s death toll had risen to more than 200. In Zimbabwe, 139 were reportedly killed and another 56 in Malawi.
But as recovery workers reach new areas, many believe the numbers will grow. “It’s going to rise is the short answer,” said Russell Geekie Jr., a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
With the immediate danger from the storm abated, the concern now is long-term disruption of the food supply and waterborne disease. “It’s inevitable,” Mr. Geekie said.
The authorities were also monitoring a dam in Marowanyati, Zimbabwe, that was straining to contain a night of heavy rainfall.
An estimated 1.5 million people were in the path of the storm. Many were already the poorest of the poor when the waters began rising. If it seemed impossible to have less, for some, the storm may prove that wrong.
See also this report from The Associated Press, via CBC News, and this report in The New Humanitarian.
