A mother dead, her two children separated – one more broken family

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A mother dead, her two children separated – one more broken family

7:50 CAT | 26 Apr 2021

FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Plataforma Media]

Two brothers, one three years old and the other only two months old, lost their mother in the escape from Palma, the town attacked a month ago in northern Mozambique.

Today, nobody knows if or when the children will even see each other again.

A month after the violence broke out in the town, the brothers ended up separated, surviving in different foster families, each in a different province, in a recurring portrayal of the broken families among the 714,000 displaced by armed violence in northern Mozambique.

The mother-of-two was already unwell when she was forced to run for her life during the attack on Palma, Domingos Samuel, father of the children and widow of Merina Ernesto, reports.

The escape on foot through the bush, without food and with only the clothes on their backs, foreshadowed the separation of the family. “We left Palma for Nangade,” about 100 kilometres away, and then Mueda, a further 70 kilometre walk with the two children.

Merina Ernesto “had sores on her feet”, and was coughing and showing increasing signs of weakness over the eight days in the bush, “with the [younger] child sucking on dirt”, says the father, who today finds himself unable to guarantee their own survival.

They eventually arrived in Pemba, where Merina was admitted to the hospital, where she died on Saturday, April 16.

The walk that was supposed to save her, ended up killing her, summarises Saíde Mapeta, another displaced person from Palma who helped the couple in Mueda and whose family, now in Pemba, takes care of the two-month-old baby.

Saíde says the three-year-old brother was placed in the care of a well-known family in Nampula, some 400 kilometres to the south.

Despite the children having been saved and welcomed, the families receiving them have few resources and depend on aid. “The baby will stay with us, but we need to walk to a place where we can ask for help to support him,” Mapeta says.

Diocesan Caritas of Pemba is one of the organizations that delivers powdered milk to orphaned and vulnerable children among those displaced by armed violence. “We will support this baby until the age of two,” Caritas coordinator in Cabo Delgado Manuel Nota says.

In some cases, the milk is also consumed by adults because of the scarcity of support, increasing pressure on humanitarian organizations, he adds.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has registered 315 unaccompanied

Source: Lusa