As Cabo Delgado province juggles large LNG reserves and ongoing violence, vulnerable civilians are paying the price.
Palma, Mozambique – It was late afternoon and darkness was approaching when Awa Salama* heard pops of gunfire and explosions: The fighters were coming.
As her neighbours made frantic telephone calls trying to warn loved ones before running wildly away, Salama locked the door to her house to keep looters out, took her children and fled.
After several days of hiding in the wilds encircling Palma – a small town on the northern tip of Mozambique about 2,700km (1,700 miles) from the capital, Maputo – she decided to search for a way out.
Salama crept through the forest with her children until she reached the towering gate of the Afungi facility, built to serve the French company TotalEnergies and its natural gas project.
For 12 hours, she waited with thousands of other people hoping for passage on a ship that could ferry them away. It never came.
A defeated Salama sought shelter at the nearby village of Quitunda, which had been constructed several years earlier to house 557 families displaced by the gas development.
She spent the next day waiting at the gates of Afungi again, looking for an escape from Palma, but she still could not find one.
