A mother squats beside a pot boiling over a wood fire near her humble brick home in Casseque III displaced persons camp in war-weary central Angola.
Beside her crouch her four children, hungrily eyeing their Spartan meal of corn hash that will keep them going for the day.
"I have to go and work. I earn a kilo of corn each day," she says.
Despite her precarious situation, this mother is part of an innovative project devised by the UN and other aid agencies in the camp in Huambo province to reduce the dependence of Angola's war victims on international community hand-outs.
In Casseque III, people who came here to avoid the death and destruction of one of Africa's oldest and most devastating conflicts go to work to eat.
The "Food for Work" campaign was launched at the beginning of the year to provide some relief amid the fighting that has raged almost uninterrupted since the diamond-rich country gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
"Food for Work" has enabled some 31,000 displaced persons to pool their various skills to build Casseque III virtually from scratch with the support of the World Food Program and various NGOs.
People taking part in the program are put to work building schools, and houses and digging wells. Some use their farming schools to plant crops.
Others do what they can. "I grind 25 kilos of corn every hour," explains an elderly man in charge of a small mill provided by the WFP.
In return, customers give him a percentage of the corn that he has ground.
"Someone who brings 10 kilos, for example, leaves me two," he says.
Other members of the camps 'workforce' are paid in varying quantities of food with which to feed their families.
Only disabled former fighters and the sick and aged are exempt from the list of tasks drawn up for able-bodied camp members in the camp, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) from Angola's capital, Luanda.
In a month, each person is allocated just 12 kilos of corn, 1.8 kilos of beans, 750 grams of oil and 150 grams of salt.
But the program has, almost inevitably, not pleased everyone.
"We want food, too. Look, You only give food to old people. What about us?" shout men and women in protest.
At Casseque III many children are still obliged to attend classes in the shade of the nearest tree because of the lack of furniture.
NGOs have built six schools, "but that is not enough, because we have 4,325 children at school this year. In all, the camp has 6,000 young people of school age", said Constantino Xinjunluji, deputy head of one of the schools.
Since 1998, 80 percent of the schools in Angola have been destroyed or abandoned. The WFP has built or restored 1,460 buildings to house schools so far this year.
Humanitarian agency officials say peace has temporarily returned to the province of Huambo.
Before and shortly after a government offensive launched against the rebel UNITA movement in September 1998, the region had been a constant target of rebel attacks.
The government called off the offensive in July.
In April NGOs calculated that 300,000 people in Angola depended on international aid.
Thousands of them began gathering in Huambo from late 1998.
Now the total number has dropped to 100,000 and could fall as low as 63,000 by December, according to the WFP.
The Angolan war, which resumed in earnest in 1998 after the collapse of a 1994 peace accord, has left at least 500,000 people dead and four million displaced out of a total population of 12 million -- HUAMBO (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
