Making and re-framing communities. The experience of community health programs of Doctors with Africa Cuamm in Mozambique

Since 2017, in the province of Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique, there have been armed attacks against the civilian population by Islamist groups who have never openly claimed the purpose of their actions towards the local government. They are referred to as NSAG Non-State-Armed-Groups. To date, the attacks in the northern districts of the province have resulted in approximately 5,000 direct victims and approximately 1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) The displaced have fled to the southern districts of the province and are welcomed in part by indigenous communities and around 400,000 live in emergency camps set up by humanitarian organizations and the local government. Since 2020 Doctors with Africa CUAMM, in collaboration with UNHCR, in addition to projects in support of maternal and child health, nutrition and more, works with psychologists, GBV experts on community engagement in displaced camps, to offer counseling and services to communities victims of various forms of abuse and trauma deriving from the condition of war displaced persons. About a third of the displaced are under 18, hundreds of families have been separated, communities have been violently uprooted from their contexts, abandoning what they had and their relationships to escape and save their lives, finding themselves in areas unknown to them , sometimes with linguistic diversity, without basic means of subsistence. With these frailties the sense of community must be supported, ties must be rebuilt and new ones created with the host community, not only to avoid conflicts for resources, but to reconstitute new meanings and social recompositions, which allow families to be able to exercise their social role. Hundreds of GBV cases have emerged as well as people in psychological distress who are accompanied, listened to and provided with essential services. Conflicts have a dramatic impact on the sense of community and this must be able to be experienced and perceived as a negotiating dimension, to allow the reconstitution of communities on a renewed basis. Taking care of community health becomes not only an emergency priority but a method for imagining different ways of sharing peaceful and solidarity. The project methodology, tools, results of the ongoing project and future prospects for the communities of Cabo Delgado will be presented during the conference.