It was dark and damp. I was washing the dishes after dinner. By a tourist lamp. In water from a bucket that my husband had just brought from the well. It was pouring outside. It had already been a day without electricity. The fridge had stopped keeping the last of the cold. We had to cook all the meat from the freezer.
We had arrived only four days earlier. At that time, the sun was beating down and it was hard to breathe the humid and hot air. A cyclone was approaching. The day before it reached the coast from the Mozambique Channel, heavy rain and wind had started. That was when the first houses were flooded. In Mozambique, it is not difficult at all. The locals mostly live in houses made of bamboo and clay or hollow cement blocks. Roofs are usually metal. Floors are dirt or poured cement. But neither the roofs, nor the windows, nor the doors are airtight. The foundations are poor or non-existent. If such a house is not destroyed after the passage of heavy rain and wind, then it has certainly drunk water.
Even ours. Practically every wall that is external is wet as well inside to some extent. In Jo’s room – half a wall. In two rooms the ceilings got wet and water started dripping. We had to go onto the roof and unclog the drain. The cement cracked. We will have to glue it. And then paint.
This happened to us. But what to do with the rubble of the house? Collect it? Arrange it into a wall? This is the third time a cyclone has hit this area in the last few months.
I am annoyed by the dampness in the house. The wavy pages of all the books. The stale air. The laundry that never dries.
This happened to us. But what to do when there is no roof at all? And another rain is coming. And how to fix it so that it will last longer than until the next cyclone?
The island of Mozambique again with enormous destruction. My husband called the man who works at the hotel where we stayed once. There has been no electricity for days. Missing people. A., whom we are helping to finish her medical studies, should also be on the island. She is doing another internship at the hospital there. We have not had any contact with her since the cyclone.
There is also no road to Pemba, which we drove through so many times last year. One of the bridges was carried away by water and it will certainly take quite a long time to rebuild it. You can try to get there in a roundabout way – 1600 km instead of 430.
I know that it happens everywhere. Recently constant, also in Poland. Cyclones (hurricanes, typhoons, hurricanes), floods, fires, earthquakes. They take people, take houses and everything that we have worked so hard for all our lives. A few days, hours, sometimes minutes and everything we have turns into nothing.
Is there a happy ending? I will not write anything that I have not already told you about many times before. He is our only answer. Even when we still do not know the full. He is our comfort, refuge, and help. Close One. Nothing will separate us from His love. Until He comes as He left. And nothing bad will happen anymore to those who persevere.
There will be no other ending.
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