Pencils scratch as students in year eight feverishly work through an exam paper. At the back of the classroom, Clara Edna Chevambo, 37, a minute figure in hand-me-down clothes, finishes first and hands her paper to the teacher. As she leaves, her 11-year-old daughter is arriving for afternoon class. A vegetable farmer who supported, clothed and fed five children, her mother and her grandmother, Chevambo is now living in a borrowed tent in a camp, one of the ones with something to do to fill a few hours.
“I’m in school every day, and I don’t want to miss class. I send my daughter to school every day.”
Where she lived and farmed in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost region, bordering Tanzania, is too dangerous a place to be now war has engulfed the region. An estimated 800,000 people have been displaced by an Islamist insurgency that has killed 3,000 people since 2017. Known as al-Shabaab, although not linked to Somalia’s group of the same name, it has declared itself affiliated to Islamic State.
