The rains keep coming

You’ve probably heard about the flooding in Mozambique, we are also having severe problems caused by the same rains and rivers. At Jubilee Centre we have estimated that there are probably around 200,000 displaced people in the country at the moment – yet for some reason it isn’t mentioned in the media locally or internationally. In one of the townships we work in around 200 of the mud brick houses have collapsed, meaning over 1,000 people are homeless. There is no drainage so nowhere for the water to go, and no foundations to hold the houses up.

Yesterday I spent the day meeting with a group of women and visiting the long-term sick, but by the time we came to leave, the road had been washed away. My colleague, Martha was bravely driving but we skidded and got stuck. I managed to work out how to put our decrepit vehicle in four wheel drive and drove praying that we wouldn’t slip into the deep gullies that had appeared. Meanwhile Martha was helpfully shouting ‘left a bit, right a bit’ from outside the vehicle! My heart was pounding so hard when we reached a bit that looked impossible to me, but everyone just said to give it some welly – people pay good money to do this sort of thing at home! But we managed and it certainly gives you a sense of achievement. I didn’t stop to take a photo of the non existent road – but we have uploaded a few photo’s of the day into our Community Faces photo set on our Flickr pages.