Sambo, Angola -- The mud-brick huts are nearly finished, the herds are fed, the fields cleared, hoed and ready for planting. The homesteads of Sambo -- twice abandoned and twice rebuilt are once more bustling with activity.
The peace accord signed on May 31, 1991 has changed the face of the Angolan planalto, the cool central plateau that was once the country's breadbasket. Thousands of peasant families are going back to their villages, often without food, shelter or the simple farm tools and seeds they need to plant their crops. After years of living the life of refugees within their own country, they are eager to return to the land that provides their livelihood.
"We just want to be able to take care of ourselves like we did before," says Valentino Sambo, the top tribal leader in Sambo, a rural community of about 9,000 people. "But now we don't have any seeds, we don't have any plows and we don't have any cattle."
The United Nations launched an emergency appeal in November 1990 to feed some 1.9 million people affected by prolonged drought and civil war. Since then, as the end of the fighting has opened up more territory to relief workers, the number of needy people accessible to help has increased. As troops from both sides demobilize and move into assembly points under the supervision of UN peace-keeping forces, the appeal has been expanded to include food and shelter for 130,000 government soldiers, plus 50,000 UNITA rebels and about 70,000 of their wives and children.
Now that the fighting is over, food aid is not enough. Relief officials predict that Angola will also need massive donations of seeds and farm implements, at least until the harvests of 1993. The effort to wean the country from dependency on hand-outs is already beginning. "We are trying to get out of free distribution as soon as possible," says Ramiro Lopes da Silva, director of operations for the World Food Program in Angola. "We prefer to distribute 'food for work' in projects to rehabilitate rural infrastructure."
Rebuilding rural infrastructure will require a massive effort. On the road from the interior provincial capital of Huambo to the port of Lobito, town after town is a collection of bombed or blown-up buildings, some without roofs, some reduced to a pile of rubble. Rural highways are littered with the skeletons of trucks and even army tanks blown apart by mines. Nearly all the bridges crossing the region's numerous streams have been blown up, forcing drivers to inch across precarious structures made from planks and logs.
Rehabilitating wounded men, women and children is another massive task faced by the government and international agencies. Estimates of soldiers and civilians maimed in the fighting range from 15,000 to 50,000. Most of the injured are amputees, whose legs were blown off by land mines. The International Committee of the Red Cross and other nongovernmental organizations working with Angolan health officials have outfitted thousands of amputees with artificial limbs. But in the towns and villages of Huambo province, it is still common to see legless men, women and children hobbling on crutches or pushing themselves in makeshift wheelchairs.
Nor have the casualties from mine explosions ceased. Although joint government-rebel teams are de-mining rural roads, thousands of explosives were also planted in the fields where farmers are now beginning to replant their crops.
The toll borne by Angolan children during the war was especially high. The UN estimates that since 1980 some 500,000 children have died either as a direct result of the fighting or from war-related causes such as malnutrition and disease. In some parts of the country, more than one out of three children die before they reach the age of five. As many as 50,000 children have been orphaned or separated from their parents. Working with the government and NGOs, UNICEF has launched an effort to trace and reunite parents and relatives with children now being held in overcrowded orphanages or foster homes.
For the people of Sambo, the peace accord represents the end of 14 years of flight. In 1977, the army forced them to abandon their far-flung homesteads and concentrate in one village. Then, in 1984, the growing violence forced them to take refuge in a Catholic mission. Some returned home the following year only to flee back to the mission when fighting resumed in 1989.
Even at the mission they were not safe. Twice, fire destroyed their makeshift village on the mission grounds. An epidemic of cholera swept through the camp in 1989. Many children died of malnutrition. And the death toll continues to rise. Two people were killed by land mines shortly after they returned to the Sambo area.
But the villagers now seem confident that at last the peace will hold. Benjamin Catchiluvia and his two sons have already begun laboriously clearing their fields with a hoe.
"It's hard work with only a hoe. We used to have a plow and two oxen," he says. "But at least I'll be able to feed my family again."
By: Mary Speck, from: Choices (The Human Development Magazine), January 1992. From the United Nations Development Program.
