The road to Corrane: IDPs waiting in the open in Nampula city – Mozambique

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The road to Corrane: IDPs waiting in the open in Nampula city – Mozambique

3:43 CAT | 24 Nov 2020

Photo: O País

Seventy people, victims of terrorism seeking to remake their lives in a new place, over the weekend spent the night outdoors in Nampula waiting for transport to the Corrane reception centre ( in Meconta district).

Sunday afternoon, hot, but partly cloudy – conditions that did not deter the youth of the Muatala’s Napala Undidade Comunal neighbourhood from taking to the local soccer field for a “friendly”.

On one side-line, 70 people stared in the direction of the field as if watching the match, when in fact they were trying to see if the vehicle to take them to the resettlement centre in Corane, Nampula province, might arrive.

Calisto Julião, 32, was one of them. Wearing a cowboy hat on his head, the young man seemed resigned. He left the district of Muidumbe, in Cabo Delgado, with his wife, children and grandmother – altogether 10 members of the same family who lived in a rented house on the outskirts of Nampula, until they ran out of money to pay the rent.

“What with paying the rent, I ran out of money to buy food, so now I want to go to Corane and make a machamba to cultivate with my children,” he said in a tired tone. Since seven o’clock that Sunday morning, he and the others had positioned themselves there with their bundles, but the expected transport never arrived.

The young father’s children lay on the ground, a clear sign of hunger, but with no food to feed them.

The lack of information was like fuel in a dry forest, and one small spark would be enough to generate great confusion in the group of displaced. “When we call the chiefs (from the neighbourhood) they say, wait until Tuesday. Now, how are we going to live here with this family? We don’t have food, water or a place to sleep,” asks Daitão João, 50, one of the displaced.

Every person who arrives in Nampula is like a character in a tragedy.

Rosa Mussa, a native of Macomia, at the Chai administrative post (the birthplace of the National Liberation Struggle), fled in the company of other members of her community, taking her four-year-old grandson with her. Her husband was murdered by the insurgents she says, and she wears the black scarf of mourning on her head.

Returning that night, our reporting team found men, women, young people, adults, children and the elderly sleeping in the open, most of them without having had a meal worthy of the name.

National Institute for Disaster Management (INGC) delegate in Nampula, Alberto Armando, said by telephone that the transporting of displaced persons from Nampula to Corane “would resume on Monday”, 23-11. It did.

By Ricardo Machava

Source: O País