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Tourist city struggles to recover
18/03/2008 11:09 - (SA)
Vilankulo - Little more than a year after Cyclone Favio ripped through Mozambique's premier tourist resort of Vilankulo, the town still resembles a refugee camp as it struggles to recover.
With faded tents and roofless, unused buildings a stark reminder of the damage inflicted by Favio, residents breathed a sigh of relief when another cyclone headed their way was downgraded on Friday to a tropical depression.
Cautious inhabitants thronged internet cafes over the weekend to keep a close eye on weather service sites to observe the movement of Cyclone Jokwe, which returned to Madagascar after being downgraded.
But even without a fresh storm hit, Vilankulo faced a long haul back to normality.
Hospital uses tents for patients
At the Vilankulo rural referral hospital, patients continued to be accommodated in tents whose United Nations Children's Fund colours had long since faded.
Malaria patient Celia Armando, 24, lying prone on one of the makeshift hospital beds, said the airy tents were nice in the heat, but not where you wanted to be if a cyclone struck.
"It is not a good place to be when everyone is talking of a cyclone ... you will just be thinking that the winds will come and lift the tents up and leave us in the wind," she said.
A hospital official who asked not to be named said reconstruction had begun, but he did not know what had taken so long.
Unicef spokesperson in Maputo Thierry Delvigne-Jean said the tents had been distributed as a temporary relief measure to house expecting mothers after the maternity ward was destroyed in the cyclone.
"I am not aware that the hospital is still using the tents to accommodate patients at the hospital," he said, adding that Unicef and the European Union had donated "huge amounts" of money for rehabilitation after the cyclone.
Children studying in tents
A short distance from the hospital, builders were busy plastering the walls of a teacher training college, which was also destroyed in the cyclone, which killed about 30 people and displaced nearly 90 000 throughout Mozambique.
Also nearby, an education department building that lost its roof in the cyclone lay abandoned after its occupants relocated to another part of town.
Children in Vilankulo were still studying in tents as they wait for their schools to be rebuilt.
Carlos Chissano, deputy national director of planning and cooperation, said that the reconstruction of schools had taken a long time as government had to wait to receive money from donors.
"For example we received $700 000 from the African Development Bank at the end of last year and we had to put the money into the 2008 budget. This meant the reconstruction of the schools was delayed," said Chissano.
Roderick Ucucho, a tourism operator in the town still had reminders on his cellphone which he used to record coconut trees being blown over and metal sheet roofs flying off houses.
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