Sixty-five-year-old Mariane Zanaba, a mother of six children from the village of Zefio in central C.A.R. has witnessed many of her country’s political upheavals over past decades. Today, however, she has become a victim herself of a conflict between the government and armed rebels that started 18 months ago in the northwest, and has now spread towards the centre of the country around Kaga Bandoro.

“Life is very hard,” she remarked to a visitor one recent afternoon. “I have spent a lot of time in the bush over the past few months with my family, when we thought the village would be attacked. We have also had our possessions stolen.”

Mrs Zanaba has received mats, blankets, kitchen bowls and soap from the ICRC, which is providing help to some 3,500 families living a precarious, twilight existence between stability and flight in dozens of local villages.

Throughout her long life Mariane Zanaba has never ventured further than the family’s manioc and groundnut fields which lie a few kilometres from Zefio in a forest clearing.

The constant uncertainty of life today has disturbed her greatly.

The insecurity around Kaga Bandoro has disrupted the local economy, and hindered trade. Travelling salesmen on bicycles used to pedal along all the forest trails, stopping at each village to sell their wares. After the harvest, merchants would come to buy the crops. Today, village life is at a standstill.

Mrs Zanaba, however, has one trump card. She knows how to spin cotton. It was a skill which her mother acquired at a time when C.A.R.’s cotton industry was thriving, and she passed on her knowledge to her daughter.

Today, like so much else in the country, the cotton business is in ruins, but Mrs Zanaba’s talent has come into its own, now that the travelling salesmen no longer pass by.

“I sell my thread for 300 CFA a reel,” she explains proudly. “It’s used for stitching the edges of the grass mats we sit and sleep on.”

As Mrs Zanaba wanders around the village her hands are constantly busy teasing a ball of raw cotton into a strong white yarn. At roughly the equivalent of 60 US cents a reel, the money she earns is helping her family survive from day to day.