“I stayed in the bush for about a week. I was alone,” says the young man who is trying to finish 11th grade at another school renovated by the Portuguese Helpo. He is the only one who comes with the uniform that he took.
Bila Sufo Amade first heard the name of Al-Shabab in 2021 and spent the next few days in the bush, in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, on the run in the school uniform she was wearing on Tuesday when she returned to school.
“I stayed for about a week in the bush. I was alone”, recalled the young student from Lusa at the Comprehensive Primary School (EPC) in Impire, Metuge district, Cabo Delgado province, where he has been displaced since then, trying to complete 11th grade, in a different school and which progressively has been recovered by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Portuguese Helpo.
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Amade’s parents, from Macomia, another village heavily hit by terrorist attacks, had already sent him to Meluco in 2020, to study at Muaguide Secondary School, until the insurgents entered that town in January of the following year.
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“They asked us: ‘Do you know Al-Shabab?’ We said no. They told us it was the first time, the second if they found us there, they killed us all”, he remembered.
“I only brought the clothes I had and the robe. It’s my uniform, I can’t give it away.“, he explained proudly, because he is the only one who continues to go to school, in the town of Impire, 50 kilometers from Pemba, with a different school uniform, compulsory in Mozambique. “They don’t tell me anything,” he joked.
At Muaguide High School, abandoned since the attacks, he was trying to finish eleventh grade. Now, in Empire, 120 kilometers away, she goes back to school, trying to finish high school. with the little income he gets from the garden, who takes care of his family, among the hundreds of displaced people there. “My dream is to be a police officer,” she shot.
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Present in the village of Impire since 2009, Helpo has built, in recent years, eight of the 12 EPC masonry rooms. Of these, in addition to several spaces for tents and classes in the shade of the tree, three were inaugurated on Monday and will reinforce the space for 12th grade classes in a town that continues to grow due to the concentration of hundreds of families fleeingthat of the insurgent attack zones.
“When we got here, there were about 800 students, right now exceeds 2,000. We think that this also has a lot to do with Helpo’s effort, but above all on the part of Helpo’s sponsors, who have supported us from the beginning”, the national coordinator of the NGO, Carlos Almeida, explained to Lusa.
Only these three rooms, inaugurated in the middle of the party, represented an investment of 45,000 euros, raised in large part by a “godfather” of the institution, in the north of Portugal, and the Eurhope organization. “When a lot of people give a little bit of support, we can do very nice things,” he pointed out.
good anthony, 28 years, fled three years ago from the town of Natuga, in Quissanga, also in Cabo Delgado, when the insurgent attacks against the district broke out, and has never returned there. Now, it is in the rooms built by Helpo where trying to complete eighth grade.
“They came and began to burn the houses,” he recalled, about the flight from his hometown, which lasted several days and nights, through the mountains, in the company of the entire population.
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“In three years I never returned to my land because I’m afraid”, he admitted. He currently lives in the reception center in Impire with his wife and three children.
“in my zone there is no school at the momentSo I thought of studying here. If the situation passes, I will return, ”he said, admitting the dream of finishing grade 12 and being in the military, recalling the days he had to flee the attacks in Quissanga. “I am Mozambican, so i want to defend mozambique”, he said.
The Impire EPC works with classrooms attached to the Metuge Secondary School, which, with the classrooms built by Helpo, enabled older pupils in the village to avoid having to travel 35 kilometers to attend 10th grade. “It was a great achievement. It helped a lot to reduce school dropouts”, highlighted Carlos Almeida.
Since 2010, in the provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado, Helpo has already built and made available 99 classrooms to the Ministry of Education of Mozambique, which will strengthen access to education in the most remote areas of Mozambique. “It is something that fills us with great pride,” she stressed.
At Empire, the NGO already provided 200 desks to the schoolthree systems of use of rain water is a library. still provides scholarships for secondary education, school snacksin addition to projects linked to Mozambican girls, such as the Laboratório da Rapariga, which also equips this school.
“A girl who studies in a school that ends in seventh gradein a rural setting like this, in Empire, most likely going to be a mother next year. While the girls and boys study, they are focused on being children, on studying, on following their dreams and not on forming a family, which often arises from group pressure and around him,” said Almeida.
The President of the Republic, Filipe Nyusi, affirmed on Friday in Maputo that the “terrorist leader” of the country, Bonomade Machude Omar, had been “out of action”, but warned that the fight against terrorism, which has affected Cabo Delgado for almost six yearsto be continue.
“So does that mean? persecution prevails and it continues to where the terrorists operate, in small groups,” Nyusi added.
The conflict in northern Mozambique has already displaced a million people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and around 4,000 deaths, according to the ACLED conflict registry project.
Source: Observadora
