wfn.org | Angola's displaced emerge from the shadows of war

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

July 23, 2002  News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212) 870-38037New York
10-21-71B{318}

NOTE: Photographs and related reports, UMNS story #312 and UMNS story #313
are available.

By Paul Jeffrey*

KIMASINQUE, Angola (UMNS) - Feliciana Alfonso came home to find only ashes.
 
After three years of living in crowded, miserable conditions with hundreds
of other displaced people in the village of Mazzami, Alfonso walked for four
days through the jungle with her husband and six children, coming back to
this village in the northern Angolan province of Uige. 

Although Alfonso grew up here, her arrival in early July was no joyful
homecoming. Where her home once stood, only one small portion of a mud wall
remains erect. A few of the poles that framed the dwelling stand charred and
crumbling. Her fields were burned and now choked with weeds. 

Alfonso set about clearing space to plant the few cassava plants she
salvaged from her temporary home in Mazzami. She's waiting now for the rains
to begin in September. In the meantime, she has little food and not much
hope. Her children are hungry and wear only rags, yet the Kikongo-speaking
Alfonso, 25, says she is content to be home. "If we are going to die of
starvation, I'd rather die at home than somewhere else," she said.

Three decades of civil war have left as many as one-third of Angola's 13
million people internally displaced. While many of the displaced fled their
homes for safer areas as their villages were caught in fighting between
government forces and UNITA rebels, others were violently pushed out.

Alfonso's family was forced to leave by UNITA, which rampaged through the
area burning houses and fields. Yet UNITA had no patent on brutality. In the
last year of the war, hundreds of thousands of Angolans were forcibly
displaced by the government as it pursued a military victory over UNITA.

With an end to the war following the death of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in
February, relief workers have gained access to half a million people who,
like Alfonso--trapped behind UNITA lines in Mazzami -- were inaccessible
because of the fighting.

What the world has discovered is a humanitarian crisis of unforeseen and
immense proportions. Among the previously unreached families, levels of
malnutrition and sickness are startling even to aid workers jaded by
sub-Saharan Africa's chronic crises.

Faced with the crisis in Angola, Action by Churches Together (ACT), the
international alliance of churches and church agencies responding to
emergencies, is working to help displaced families return home and enjoy the
life in peace they have long awaited. The United Methodist Committee on
Relief is a major member of ACT.

In this northern province of Uige, one ACT member, the Evangelical Reformed
Church of Angola (IERA/ACT), is beginning to assist 10,000 displaced
families.

Half of the people being assisted by IERA/ACT, like Feliciana Alfonso, have
just emerged from the bush, and the church organization is providing them
with soap, blankets, clothing, buckets, and other critical non-food items.
The United Nation's World Food Program provides the displaced here with
emergency food. 

Many of the displaced families are considered too debilitated by their
ordeal to return to their home communities before the rains begin in
September, and IERA/ACT and other aid agencies will accompany them for
several months as they recover their strength.

The other 5,000 families IERA/ACT will assist in Uige are those who have
been displaced for some time yet were within reach of food assistance and
other aid programs during the closing months of the war. Many will return
home in coming weeks, or have already begun to return home, and IERA/ACT
will provide them with seeds and agricultural tools to help them restart
their subsistence farming.

"Many of the displaced are tired of waiting," said Victor Balanquete, a
relief official with IERA/ACT. "They've been waiting so long for peace that
they're not going to sit around any longer waiting for the government or the
U.N. or some nongovernmental organizations to tell them it's now acceptable
for them to return. They want to get on with life, get on with enjoying the
peace which we have finally achieved."

IERA/ACT will also assist almost 12,000 people living in a UNITA
demobilization camp at Uamba, principally with non-food items like soap,
blankets, kitchen kits, buckets and agricultural tools.

IERA/ACT workers made an initial assessment visit to the Uamba camp on July
17. Balanquete says all assistance the church organization provides to the
demobilized families will be coordinated with local government officials,
the U.N. and other aid groups, in order to avoid duplication or gaps in
assistance.

Leaders in the UNITA camp also asked the church to provide assistance with
the reintegration of the former combatants into civilian life. "They asked
us to help with vocational training so that the soldiers can have more
possibilities to survive in civilian life. And they asked us to provide
training for reconciliation, to help overcome the polarization of our
society into us and them," Balanquete said.

The long war left many victims, and IERA/ACT is rehabilitating a war-torn
building in the provincial capital of Uige to expand its work with street
children, many of them war orphans. It is also hoping to rehabilitate, for a
second time, a group of buildings in nearby Kikaya.

During the last period of quasi-peace in Angola in the late 1990s, IERA/ACT
rehabilitated several war-wrecked buildings in the village to use as a
vocational training center, health clinic, warehouse, and offices for the
church's relief program. Yet after fighting resumed in late 1998, marauding
UNITA forces demolished the center. 

Despite losing the Kikaya facility, IERA/ACT assisted some 10,000 families
during the last two years of the war, with support from the ACT alliance and
the United Nations. Now that peace appears to have arrived for good in
Angola, the church organization plans on expanding its commitment to
Angolans left in misery by the conflict.

# # #
*Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America. He was on
special assignment in Angola for ACT International.

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org