Torrential Rain
Monday, February 12th, 2007
When Manuel de Araujo MP spent the weekend in my constituency, he was on the telephone several times, or texting Mozambique.
The reason is that there are appalling floods there, not least in his constituency as a result of very heavy rains in Zambia and Zimbabwe, so that the enormous Cabora Bassa Dam is overflowing. So far 68,000 have been displaced and 27,000 are now in accommodation centres along the Zambezi River. The head of Mozambique’s national relief agency estimates that the total number of displaced people may rise to 280,000. Manuel is flying back this week. He told me that the inevitable end product of such flooding, on top of all the death and destruction, is a chronic outbreak of malaria. In 2000 and 2001 flooding killed over 700 people.
This sort of tragedy puts everything in our country in context.
Meanwhile, I am personally off to the United States for a few days, so blogging is suspended until next week.