Making a Difference

11 Ndalatando, Angola

Ndalatando, Angola After four years in Nyango, Zambia, I was transferred to Angola in September 1979. We had a large number of Namibian refugees there – over 35,000 people. I left Lusaka and arrived in Kwanza Sul (Kwanza south), the main centre where the refugees were staying. The camp was situated in a beautiful, green, deserted coffee plantation in a farm called Kambuta, but our people were living in makeshift tents. The SWAPO President, Comrade Sam Nujoma, was very concerned about the health condition of the children and told me that whilst the situation in Nyango was very stable, that in Kwanza Sul needed urgent attention. He ordered me to take charge of the people’s health, particularly children who were dying of preventable childhood diseases. The Angolan Government had recently given SWAPO another site which was a lush coffee plantation in the province of Kwanza Norte (Kwanza north). It was about 15 kilometres south of the town of Ndalatando. A decision was taken to move the children to this place from the main camp in Kambuta and we did so shortly after my arrival. The condition of the children was bad; they had sores all over their feet caused by some insects or parasites. I had no idea what it was, since I had never seen these sores before, but people in the know called them takayas. The place had previously been inhabited by Cuban soldiers and when they moved out it was given to SWAPO. When we arrived, the Cubans had gone but they had left a dog, which we inherited. This dog was a symbol for the children who had never seen a dog before. Soon any four-legged animal was called a dog, to the extent that when a comrade from Sumbe brought us some goats to keep for milk for the children, they were also called dogs by the children. One day we slaughtered a goat but to the children it was a dog, and they told President Nujoma when he visited them that Meme Doctor had slaughtered a dog and we had eaten all the meat. The President found the story hilarious and asked me, ‘Since when have we started eating dogs?’ I was taken aback 99 Ndalatando, Angola by the question and then the President told me what the children had told him. I also used animal pictures when I was checking the eyesight of the children in the hospital and I was amused at their response: every four-legged animal was a dog but this was fine to me, as long as they could see it clearly. Sometime later our dog disappeared and we were told that an old man had eaten it, but I think maybe the dog died from old age somewhere in the thickets of the tropical plantation. At our centre in Kwanza Norte we had one main house and four other structures. The main house had fifteen to twenty rooms and had presumably been used as a hostel for the plantation workers. We turned that into the sleeping quarters for the children. There was also a big hall, which we made into a school. One of the buildings became the hospital and the other became a house for the supervisors, where I stayed. The last remaining structure was made into a storeroom. The refugees made their dwellings from tents and corrugated iron sheets. The place needed to be made habitable, so first we put all the children into the big hall while we were cleaning and painting the various rooms. At the same time, the four nurses and I were treating the children, dressing their wounds, and feeding them with high-energy milk and nutritious food. I don’t remember which organization gave us children’s beds; I think it was UNICEF. The cleaning and painting of the rooms was a mammoth task. I remember that we started very early in the morning and worked till dark because the rooms needed to be completed so we could move the children in. There was a soldier who came from the front, Theophilus Namupala, who was an artist. He was a blessing as I wanted this place to be pleasant and feel like home to the children. I asked him to paint the outside walls and draw pictures on them. He did a fantastic job and when it was finished the place looked so beautiful. When everything was ready, and as the children recovered their health, we moved them in...