Don't Blink

Mozambique's flood waters are receding and the news cameras are shifting their focus to other crises elsewhere in the world. Blink.

As the water recedes, the full extent of the damage can be assessed. The government has estimated that cleaning up the mess will cost US$71 million, but that grossly underestimates the extent of the damage. More telling are the personal impact statistics: an estimated 494,000 people impacted, including 38 deaths.

Survival is assured only by the tenuous strength of a thread, as thousands depend upon the acts of selfless front-line volunteers like David Morrison and the countless people whose support allows them to fill their convoys of trucks with maize meal and supplies.

But for many in Mozambique, the real crisis is just beginning.

Over the coming months, hundreds of thousands of people will leave these temporary refugee camps and return to their homes to find little more than piles of mud. Their crops, which would have been harvested this month and stored to feed their families until the next harvest, have been washed away. There will be little to eat in the coming months, not to speak anything of excess to hawk at the market.

Those who do have excess to sell will have difficulty recovering their costs, having to compete against the tons of international food aid that will depress local market prices. The arrival of food is good news for the starving, but bad news for the small-scale merchants trying to make a living. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which coordinates food aid in such crises, has said that they will purchase as much food locally as possible, and is asking donor nations for cash to do so.

The WFP's challenge isn't restricted to feeding those families affected by the flooding. In the south of Mozambique, a short but intense heatwave this summer caused nearly three times as many hectares of crops to wilt as washed away in the floods. The heatwave didn't make the international news because, well, watching video footage of a heatwave is like watching video footage of paint drying. It's dull. Raging floodwaters, low-flying helicopters, washed-out bridges and dramatic rescues all help the newscasters to compete against other shows that feed our Hollywood-induced attention deficits.

Despite the action-packed video footage, floods are slow-motion disasters. Judging by the datestamps on the emails that we received, Mozambique was flooding for at least six weeks before it was severe enough to make the news back home.

And its people will be recovering long after the last news crews sign their bylines and file their stories.

Blink.

It's not realistic to think that the news could broadcast every emerging crisis around the world. That's not the point. But featuring these stories creates two opposing problems: first, that viewers assume that when there's not a story on the evening news, that there's not a problem. Far from the truth. Second, they paint these places as dens of permanent disaster, of places they would not like to visit.

Mozambicans that I've talked with are embarrassed that the floods make international headlines. They're embarrassed that the international community will think of Mozambique as a country that hobbles from one crisis to the next.

They want the news to focus on Africa's humanity, not its poverty. They want people to know that many great things happen in Mozambique in all the space between the punctuations of tragedy.

When we turn the channel, they continue to live. When we send our aid cheques to the next country, they continue to live. When our attention shifts, they continue to live.

Don't blink.