Children holding plates and cups in their hands as SOS Children's Villages provides them with nutritious food in famine affected Benguela

  Children holding plates and cups in their hands as SOS Children's Villages provides them with nutritious food in famine affected Benguela  

I've been reading about what it's like to live in Angola, which means, essentially, what it's like living with the legacy of war. This is the report I've been reading:

The sound of children singing can often be heard echoing around the desolate orphanage, which is now receiving support from the SOS Social Centre in the coastal town of Benguela.

It's a song sung by a generation that, like much of the population, has no first-hand knowledge of a peaceful reality. Angola, with its breath-taking scenery and white washed beaches, is not only a beautiful country, it is potentially one of Africa's wealthiest -- it is rich in oil and diamonds. But this African nation is still deeply scarred from the almost 27-year long conflict between the government and rebel Unita movement. There was the signing of a ceasefire agreement in April 2002. However the civil war has taken a devastating toll. The conflict killed about a million people, uprooted millions more and left a generation which knows nothing but war. The vast majority of the country's four million internally displaced people are children, and some 100,000 youngsters have been separated from their families.

During the war more than 5,000 schools were destroyed and today giving Angolan children access to proper education is very important. The majority of the country's hospitals and health facilities were also levelled during the fighting. The fertile soil is strewn with landmines and most of the infrastructure lies in ruins. Grinding poverty is reality for most of Angola's people .

The ceasefire only lifted a curtain that hid the full impact of the war on the civilian population in the countryside. Malnutrition among people emerging from the conflict zones "is one of the worst seen in Africa in the past decade" said Médecins Sans Frontières when the shocking reality of what life had become became clear. "The peace has had no meaningful impact on people's lives," says Jozsef Szalontai, project director for SOS Children's Villages Angola. SOS Children's Villages in Angola's SOS Children's Villages started its work offering care to the weakest victims of the war in and around the relatively safe location of Lubango, the capital of the southern province Huila. However, before construction of the first SOS Children's Village could be completed, a far-reaching emergency vaccination campaign was launched to fight a meningitis epidemic that killed hundreds of children. It was to be the first of a number of SOS Emergency Relief Programmes. In 1997, SOS Children's Village Lubango imple mented additional relief measures, which continue today. Initially around 400 children suffering from malnutrition received one nutritious meal per day. Then a year later, in response to the huge number of refugees, a second food distribution centre for children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with special needs was established in a slum area some 10 kms away