Nothing prepares you for Malange. Access to the other central Angolan cities of Kuito and Huambo, is only possible by air. The roads are heavily mined and pass through open countryside captured by rebels.

The World Food Programme, a division of the UN, which flies in supplies to the aid agencies, also supplies small 12-seater planes to transport the workers themselves. Because of the danger of shelling the planes fly at 26,000 feet until they are above their destination, before making a spiral dive above the airport to avoid shelling from rebel positions. Two planes have been lost to rebel fire this year.

There is not one window left in the airport building. Most of the interior walls are missing and the structure has obviously suffered a few direct hits from shelling. Regardless, we are taken inside to have our passports checked.

Malange is now no longer a city but, more accurately, a parody of one.

Some 200,000 refugees who had fled the surrounding countryside to the rapidly expanding shanty town or ruined city centre were encouraged by the UN and the government and spurred on by the peace process, to return to agriculture last year. They were aided by Concern and a number of development agencies including de-mining agencies such as the Halo Trust and Greenfields.

It is immediately apparent that these people are back again. Starving. While the rebels have been driven away, the countryside around the city has been mined again, this time, it is assumed, by the government.

Peter McNichols, the Concern worker responsible for setting up Concern's food effort, is welcomed wherever he goes by people looking for food, money or, better still, a job. It is Concern's policy to employ local people to run their efforts and the jobs are highly sought after.

Pedro Creuz (13) is among the small group outside the Concern house. He chased a rabbit down a hole and had his leg blown off by a mine. Now he cares for his little brother Alberto (9). He suggests his mother for a job to the Concern group. The family used to live six km to the east but came to Malange for safety.

Another man, who the aid-workers knew from last year, had been a start-your-own-business candidate working in tailoring. Now he has sold his furniture to pay for an operation his child needed after being hit in the stomach by shrapnel. There is still medical aid available here, but it is all private.

"It is worse now than it was three years ago," says Mark Allison.

Next, the group visits a Medicine Sans Frontier (MSF) camp set up in a shelled school. Two hundred and fifty children are fed here in emergency therapeutic feeding. therapeutic refers to children who are too malnourished to immediately resume a normal diet. After a few weeks here they will move on to supplementary feeding centres where they will receive a normal diet.

MSF personnel are delighted to see Concern and a pact is quickly arranged to set up the therapeutic and supplementary centres in tandem. Whatever about competing for funding, the agencies appear to have no problem co-operating on the ground and much is exchanged between organisations such as Save the Children, Care, MSF and Concern.

THE following day, back in Luanda news comes in that towns around the city of Kuito have been taken by rebels and a possible visit there is cancelled. This is the difficulty facing the aid agencies, they get in and help, then it becomes too dangerous and they have to pull out.

"We really need people and we need to be able to guarantee their safety" says Mark Allison of the aid efforts. The reality of this remark is borne out when Malange is hit by five shells as our plane takes off that afternoon. "Some rain but nobody drenched" we hear over the radio and Mark explains that aid workers are not allowed use their radios to comment on the war.

A day later and the Concern group is able to move on to Huambo. Once a pleasant, even elegant city, the fighting here has left it even more scarred than Malange. Concern has a medical centre, a medical outpost at the edge of the city where an agriculture project is underway, and two nutritional and two supplementary feeding centres.

One centre in a disused winery contains some 20,000 people. Here Concern has set up feeding centres, a vaccination centre, medical aid and sanitation.

As in Malange, these centres are housed in buildings which are little more than ruins. A number of lorries which ferried in supplies during the ceasefire are still here, their owners living in the cabs, no notion of when they will get out.