How to live with the nightmares? Story of the Mozambique survivors
How to rebuild a human life after suffering the atrocities of war and violence?
After you treat her wounds, give her shelter and food, how to help a person to get her life back. Or just to begin one.
Maria is 10 years old. What she had seen already in her city of Palma in Mozambique is hard to even depict. But she still vividly remembers the day when the attackers came into her village. She was separated from her family and had to face alone the atrocities of the armed men, who burned down the houses, forced her to watch the beheadings of the friends and neighbours. She ran away. Later she got caught in an animal trap, had malaria, and learned that her mother and her father had been beheaded in that attack.
This experience alone will hunt Maria forever in the nightmares if she doesn’t get any psychological help.
Another survivor of the Palma attack remembers: “What I saw cannot be unseen, I never thought death could be like that.”
What is the story?
For years the region of Cabo Delgado, where Palma is situated, was the poorest outskirt of Mozambique. The violence started in 2017 when international oil companies came into the area following the discovery of large reserves of liquified oil and gas offshore. Since then local Islamic insurgencies only increase in intensity and brutality of the attacks in which they target local villagers: burning homes, destroying farms, and publicly beheading women and children.
According to Amnesty International, on top of violence from the insurgent groups, people also suffer from the government forces.
At the end of March, fighting intensified after the French oil giant Total announced that they unfreeze the $20 billion construction project in Palma. Since then the group, known locally as both Al-Shabab and Al-Sunna wa Jama’a, linked to the Islamic State, raided the gas-rich town, killing and wounding civilians.
UNHCR reported that since 24 March, over 19,000 people have fled Palma to the neighbouring towns with thousands more displaced inside the Palma district. Nearly 700,000 people, mainly women, children, and the elderly are internally displaced in the provinces neighbouring Cabo Delgado.
What happened?
People who managed to flee the area tell horrifying stories.
Many witnessed how family and friends were publicly beheaded or shot and their homes burned to the ground.
Those who survived were chased and hunted by the insurgents. They had to walk hundreds of kilometres coming across the bodies of others who had been killed or died from hunger or thirst. “The only water available was from a single dirty river. People usually followed the main roads, but sleep well inside the forests for protection, avoiding villages and surviving on what little they can find”.
Many who arrives at the temporary shelter don’t have much of the physical injuries aside from dehydration and sores on their feet from long walking. However, their mental traumas are overwhelming.
Many had to suffer such emotional turmoil repeatedly.
The 31-year-old mother-of-three Maria is one of those who has to escape twice in two years from the attacks leaving everything behind.
She was working in the field when her husband called to alert her about the attack. She and her three daughters managed to get to safety by water while others were drowning. She reached her relatives in the neighbouring town but didn’t hear from her husband since.
Such a story isn’t unique. There is, for example, Zainabo who moved to Palma because of the fear for life in another city. But this year she lost not only her business and house but also her eldest son. Reunited with younger children after a dreadful trip from Palma to Afungi under the gunshots, she doesn’t know where to go with her children and how to continue looking after them.
After all the horror they went through, “they will have to rebuild not only a home but the very concept of who they are while they process all the losses they’ve had along the way”.
Despite suffering from anxiety, post-traumatic stress, hyper-alertness, nightmares, hopelessness, grief, people, who lost their families and homes, don’t often consider mental health as a priority
According to the MSF experts on the field, psychological support is a new concept for them. “They often think mental health services are just for people with mental disorders, and they don’t know that these concerns they have, this sadness or sensation of hopelessness, can be treated, that they don’t have to do it all alone and that there are professionals that can help them overcome this.”
Even graver the situation is for children who are scared and numb, lost trust in adults, and are closed from the outside world. How much time will pass before they will be able to go to school and regain some sense of normalcy despite the terror they have experienced?
MSF is trying to provide psychological aid at the first moments as a response to help people recompose. Often the opportunity to express themselves and to share what they faced and how they feel can “give a sense of relief”.
Unfortunately, psychological first aid is only short-term support that lets people recover strength to face what’s in front of them as they need to rebuild their life and handle what comes next.
Save the Children and other humanitarian organizations on the field report that, the Mozambique Humanitarian Response plan just 1% funded, there remains a gap of US $250 million that urgently needs to be filled.
What to do?
Humanitarian appeal is a very complex mechanism. In a crisis like the one in Mozambique, which experts call “humanitarian catastrophe beyond epic proportions”, a lot of funds are required and many organizations are involved.
I suggest here to support Doctors Without Borders who are at the forefront of helping people with psychological support aside from all the other medical needs.
Some estimates show “Mental health and psychosocial support in post-conflict environments is highly effective: every $1 invested in treatment for depression can lead to a $5 return in better health”.
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