It began with a farmer who wanted to see how his neighbours had weathered a deadly cyclone. It has turned into an extraordinary grassroots relief operation that has helped thousands in rural Mozambique.
Helicopters land in the farmhouse's driveway. Aid workers in matching T-shirts sleep in tents in the front yard and on the roof. And hundreds of local subsistence farmers whose lives were swept away by the floods drop by to collect the food and supplies to start again.
Cyclone Idai hit this part of rural Mozambique particularly hard, with torrential rains draining down from the nearby mountains that separate the country from Zimbabwe. Rivers burst their banks leaving corn stalks hanging from electrical wires. Meanwhile, workers at the farm were reporting distress in communities across the crocodile-inhabited Lecito River behind the farm. Remote by road -- a 150-kilometre drive -- and yet just a kilometre across the water, the communities were judged to be in "critical" need of help, van de Wall said.
Eventually, word about the homegrown relief operation filtered out to aid groups hurriedly trying set up operations in the cyclone-hit region while roads were repaired and waters drained. Many needed somewhere to sleep, eat and get marginally clean. Seventeen-year-old Pieter Botha, the son of the farmhouse's owner, Kobus, has watched the organized chaos since arriving a week after the cyclone from Maputo to help out, and who had been loading helicopters that day.
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