Some children begged for water. The mothers faced the awful choice of ignoring their pleas or quenching their babies' thirst with the filthy remnants of the flood. The torrent of water has left a tide mark about 3m-high on the walls of the church, which was home to many of Chokwe's Aids sufferers before the floods. The floor is thick with mud, some cleared to make way for the new patients. In the corridor, a young girl on a reed mat awaits treatment for malaria.
Volunteers wash the mud from packets of medicines.
Bandages caked in filth are laid out in the sun to dry alongside the tuberculosis records. One doctor, Sister Elisa Verdu, despairs at a lack of assistance to Chokwe even though Mozambique is now the target of the biggest foreign aid airlift in Africa since the Rwanda crisis six years ago. There are a lot of people here with malaria. We don't even have enough of the basic medicines. We don't have drinking water.