During the 16-year civil conflict, many of the roads were also impassable, because of mines and the threat of ambush. Now it's a new war, against water. So the people of Mozambique, a country which a couple of years ago was listed as the poorest in the world, have drawn on past experience of free flights from aid aircraft. The war also destroyed schools and health facilities, and so did the floods. It says preliminary assessments show that about 50 health centres and four hospitals were damaged or destroyed.
Nobody yet knows the full cost of the disaster.
The government and UN agencies are working on an assessment which will be presented to an international donor conference in Rome next month. What makes Mozambique's plight all the more tragic is that it was one of the few countries in Africa that had begun to ride a wave of an economic turnaround which had seen GDP rising by around 10 percent annually. But nobody is prepared to speculate how long this country of some 17 million people will take to recover from such a hard knock.