Just one forensically trained team is moving through rural areas where locals are burying the dead before they can be identified.
A man stands near where a body was found along the Lucite River in Magaro, Mozambique, on Tuesday. By Max Bearak Max Bearak Africa bureau chief based in Nairobi Email Bio Follow March 27 at 5:55 PM MAGARO, Mozambique — The smell of death hovered in the air by the river.
The flooding is estimated to have affected nearly 2 million people in Mozambique, where the official number of dead stands at 468. But the actual death toll from Cyclone Idai may never be known. Looking up at the body in the tree, Fonseca lamented that he wouldn’t be able to recover it, let alone identify it.
The work is arduous. A truck carrying Fonseca’s team was stuck in mud for a day and a night, and a car carrying reporters was damaged and knocked off a dirt road by a frightened bull. “It was either stay and die or walk through the rising water,” Machava said. “I put one child on each of my shoulders, held my mother’s hand, and my two sisters followed behind us.”The storm’s timing was cruel: Idai landed on the eve of the harvest. When the water subsided and survivors returned to their fields, they found the entirety of their livelihoods ruined. Many are eating nothing but oranges from the tops of trees — the only crops that survived.
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