The wall of Rita Cizambimwe's front room shines brightly in the sun, a purple curtain fluttering in the window. The floor is the problem; there is none, since the worst floods in living memory hit Maputo a month ago.
A torrent of water and red mud swept through Rita's house, taking away the ground from under half of the house. The same flow drove a 10-ft gash in the earth where the road to South Africa used to pass in front of her home. Crops, animals and possessions were washed away and buried latrines disturbed.
"It rained for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day, the house started to move and we left," she says, pointing to the overhanging wall.
But once the rains stopped, Rita and her children simply moved into the rear of the house.
She was given food and blankets, and resumed life as normal. Her neighbour in this suburb of Machava was even more practical; she simply put up a new tin shack directly behind the place where her old house used to stand.
The reason the road disappeared is evident from the cross-section visible in the ravine. A thin veneer of tarmacadam, maybe an inch thick, was simply laid on top of the red earth. There was no bed of sand or gravel, nor any runoff channel for surplus water. Tropical countries such as Mozambique can do nothing to prevent extreme weather, but unless they can build a proper infrastructure they are doomed to suffer disproportionately.
Not that the spirit of enterprise is lacking. Down the road in Machava, villagers have already planted neat rows of lettuce on the new soil deposited by the floods. The pity is that the floods also dislodged the drains, and these cottage gardens stink of untreated sewage.
The hygiene problem is widespread, and poses the greatest threat to Mozambicans as they get back on their feet. Only a few hundred yards from Maputo's airport, for example, young children dodge cars on the highway in order to obtain drinking water from the muddy brown pools in potholes. Others seem to be washing themselves in the outflow from a sewage pipe.
These victims of the country's first wave of floods in early February are still waiting for basic infrastructure to be repaired, so it's likely the survivors of last week's wave of flooding will face similar delays. In many areas, overflowing latrines and the presence of so many dead animal carcasses will have poisoned the soil. The quality of life in a country which is already one of the poorest in the world, where the average life expectancy is a shocking 45 years, is likely to deteriorate even further.
So far, though, predictions of malaria and cholera epidemics have not been realised. Last week, 31 cases of cholera were reported in Maputo, one-tenth of the figure the previous year. In some camps, it has been reported that up to half the survivors are suffering from malaria, but it's quite likely most were living with the disease long before the floods drove them from their homes.
According to the World Health Organisation yesterday, all the elements for a cholera epidemic are now present. However, given the massive aid arriving in Mozambique, fresh outbreaks of disease should be contained easily.
Now that those most at risk have been rescued, the real challenge will be to return to the task of developing this impoverished country and its people. This means rebuilding the infrastructure, teaching people to adapt to changing environmental realities - in an era of global warming, the current floods will surely not be the last - and giving them the skills to minimise exposure to disease. It's a long-term task, which will go on long after the cameras and the helicopters have left.
