Peace brings hope for family reunion

Adriana Jamba bestows a look of infinite tenderness on her four-year-old son, touches him gently, constantly, and sighs deeply as she relates her story. He is the only physical link she has to her old life, to her first "real" love.

At Adriana's breast, a baby boy suckles, somewhat ignored as she contemplates picking up the pieces of her life. A look of hope and a slight smile flash across her face as she speaks of the husband she plans to see any day now and clutches her older son closer to her chest. The brutal war that ripped her family apart is over, and she is determined to go home.

Adriana's story is unfolding in the central highlands of Angola, where a ceasefire in April between government and UNITA forces ended 30 years of war and reignited sparks of hope for hundreds, maybe thousands, of women like her.

She tells her story without emotion, without self-pity, making it more poignant, more tragic than any story borne out of the figment of any storyteller's imagination.

"I was captured in Kuito [the capital of Bie province] in 1999 and taken to a village near Jamba [Huambo province] by UNITA soldiers. We walked for a long time. I was with my son. I had to leave my husband behind. He was a government soldier," she says softly. "We had three children, but two of them got sick and died."

"I had to get a new husband, a UNITA soldier, and I have his son now too. But I am going to find my husband because I heard he is still in Kuito."

When asked if she thinks her husband will want her back now that she has a son from an enemy soldier, a slow smile breaks across her face, but does not reach her eyes.

"I think so, my husband came here a long time ago and told my mother, who is a displaced person here in Huambo, that I should go back to Kuito. I would go back now if my health was better, but maybe he will come here again looking for me too, but I will find him," she says.

The past three years have been difficult for Adriana. She even tried to flee her captors to return to Kuito, her husband and the rest of her family, but she was separated from her son and put into "jail" for three days. "I was not hurt, they [UNITA soldiers] just let me go because I said I won't try to run away again," she recalls. "Also, my UNITA husband, he did treat my son well."

There were periods, she says, when she was on the run all the time with the UNITA-supporting community she became part of. "Sometimes it was different. We received food from the UNITA soldiers who collected supplies from other villages. But sometimes it was different - we were on the run all the time, sometimes in the rain, with no food and with our children."

Her UNITA husband, she says, was with her most of the time, giving her no opportunity to escape. "Sometimes he left to go fight for one or two weeks, but he used to be there most of the time.

"This is why I am happy that [Jonas] Savimbi [the founder and leader of UNITA whose death in combat on 22 February paved the way for possible peace in Angola] died. I had a good life in Kuito before ... this. I was happy with my husband, he treated me kindly, I love him. I have some cousins there and some brothers. My life was so different."

Now her life could change again. The ceasefire led to tens of thousands of UNITA soldiers and their families being quartered in camps throughout the country. Adriana accompanied her husband to one such camp, in Sambo, but was brought to nearby Huambo city, to the nutritional feeding centre run by international aid group CONCERN, because she and her two children were severely malnourished.

It is here that she learned that her mother, whom she has not seen since 1998, was living in a camp for people displaced by the war. It is here that she learned that her husband has been looking for her. It is here that she began to hope a little, like many of the others being treated at the old fish factory.

"First we were told that Savimbi died, but the politicians said it was just a lie. Only now they are saying that he died. We heard the war stopped through the radio, and we knew [for sure] when the helicopter came to take the UNITA general there to Moxico," she says.

But, before her journey home is complete, Adriana must sever ties with her UNITA husband - and she is not sure he will allow her to return to her old life. Neither is she sure about the reception she will get in Kuito, primarily a government-supporting community, after spending so much time in UNITA captivity.

"He [the UNITA husband] is still in Sambo. He doesn't know I don't want him anymore. I will lie to him and tell him that I am in the city trying to work and to find my mother. But I have to go back to Sambo to get my belongings before going to Kuito," she says.

Then, when asked if she has ever prayed for the death of the UNITA husband, she looks away from her older son to the one suckling restlessly at her breast, looking a bit shocked. "No, no, never, I didn't pray for him to die, but if he did die, I would be happy."

With this she decides it is time to take her children back into the fish factory lined with make-do straw beds and filled with women and children weakened by years of war.

A short while later, Adriana's mother arrived at the nutritional centre and met her daughter for the first time in four years. There were no tears, just an unspoken sense of relief in the air. She told Adriana it was true that her husband had been to the province in search of her and they spoke of the future, of finding and reuniting the surviving members of their family.

But for Adriana, the future is still uncertain, hope still a trifle premature. She is still not the master of her own destiny. The ending of her story, and that of other women in her position, depends on the success of Angola's peace process, on the capacity of government and NGOs to find and reunite families torn apart during the past 30 years and the capacity of Angolans themselves to forgive and move on.