Carol’s Column

Come on all, give whatever you can ...

The power of television as a medium was apparent to everyone who switched on this weekend to watch the news. The disaster happening in the northern part of our own country, and just across the borders in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, was devastating TV.

In Mozambique, in particular, rains and flooding rivers have been exacerbated by Cyclone Eline and throughout that country, hundreds of thousands of people are fighting for their lives as the waters rise.

Many years ago, I happened to be on the Botswana side of the Limpopo River, in the Tuli area, when flash floods caused what had been a slow-flowing river to turn into a raging torrent of water.

As we looked where we'd been intending crossing, a wall of water pushed down, carrying with it debris, fallen trees, bushes, drowned cattle.

I have never seen anything so frightening. What I remember was the suddenness. How a mirror-peaceful river turned into a turbulent, fast-flowing destructive mass of water.

Mozambique has a beautiful coastline. Beaches are unspoilt, the marine life rich and the people welcoming and hospitable. In recent years, tourism has been one of Mozambique's most rapidly growing industries, bringing in much needed foreign currency and providing so many with jobs.

If, however, you have ventured inland, you will have seen that poverty is widespread with locals living in small homesteads, barely surviving.

Visits to village schools will have revealed lively children with a will to learn but few facilities. You would have noticed they were all thin, as were their parents.

Once, when on the South African side of the border, while visiting a game park, we inadvertently crossed over into Mozambique without realising it and found ourselves outside a hut in which lived an elderly couple.

They were, they told us, Mozambicans. They were so thin, they looked as if they had been hewed from wood. Graciously, he fetched the only chair and she brewed weak tea.

Over tea, we learnt that Nuno Palmeira and his wife Lena had worked for a large cashew nut factory. They had cleaned and shelled nuts, roasted them, and, from the shells extracted a liquid which was sold as a by-product used in the manufacture of plastics.

Nuno's grandfather, he said, had been Portuguese, hence the family name of Palmeira. With the external wars and internal civil conflict, the cashew nut factory shut down and the Palmeiras, along with the majority of civilians in Mozambique, suffered terrible deprivations.

Everywhere, villages were attacked and plundered by soldiers from all sides, their minimal food supplies stolen, their sons and daughters taken.

When we met the Palmeiras, their poverty was extreme, yet they invited us to tea as if we were royalty. We stayed overnight, camping in their yard, providing dinner and then leaving food.

They would, we said, be doing us a favour accepting the cans and fruit as our vehicle was severely overloaded and we were battling the sand.

Now, on TV, I watch people, young and old, up to their shoulders in water, wade through the floods to dry land carrying the few things they can salvage.

It is a pitiful, heartbreaking scene.

Nuno and Lena, if they are alive today, would have been affected by the floods as they lived in a low-lying area.

It is easy to be momentarily moved by other people's hardship and it is human to then forget and resume one's life.

But take a moment to find clothes, blankets, food, toys, money – the flood victims will be grateful for everything.

Up north and in Mozambique, fellow Africans need us. To give with a warm heart is a blessing.

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