Blinking, sodden and smelly, dressed in the Western hand-me-downs of Africa's poor, they stumble off their first and probably last helicopter ride. These are the lucky ones, who have lost their farms and possessions, and maybe even some of their family, but who have escaped from Mozambique's latest catastrophe with their lives intact.
The scene is Chibuto airstrip, a thin line of tarmac in an expanse of scrub 100 miles north-east of the capital, Maputo. This is the drop-off point for dozens of hapless survivors of the floods, plucked from roofs and trees that are now up to 20 ft under water. There's a constant whirring of rotors in the hot skies above Chibuto, but in fact all the heroics are being performed by no more than six South African helicopter crews.
Each load brings a new set of stories: a blind man who escaped the rising waters of the Limpopo by climbing on to his roof, where he was rescued four days later; a family who survived to reach higher ground by clinging to their cattle; a couple who spent eight days in a tree. One man emerged, smiling triumphantly; from his jacket he pulled a live chicken which he had smuggled on board - dinner!
Not everyone made it.
"We see women here, their breasts full of milk, but there is no sign of their children," says William, a Dutch pastor who was looking after the survivors in Chibuto yesterday. Most can carry all that remains of their possessions in a bundle on their backs.
"It was like being in the middle of a dam," said Lorenzo, struggling to describe the wall of water that hit his farm last week. Though limping badly, Lorenzo fled to higher ground, but the waters chased him. He clambered up a tree with two other men and spent four days watching the water lap ever higher against the walls of his farmhouse. Asked what he lived on, he replied: "All my food was in my hands."
By the time of his rescue, he was fit to collapse, which is what he did on being disgorged from the helicopter. His shirt ragged and torn, he limped off sadly into the bush.
That so many people are still being rescued from perilous situations one week after the last big surge in water levels is testament to the slowness of the international rescue mission and the huge number of people and territory involved.
Gaza province, through which the Limpopo flows, is about twice the size of Ireland, and up to half of it is now under water. Seen from the air yesterday, the Limpopo was more like a vast reservoir than Africa's tenth-longest river. At times during the 40-minute helicopter ride from Maputo, floodwater extended all the way to the horizon, broken only by a few tree-tops and high roofs.
The world always looks simpler from the air, but in this landscape everything is truncated; 60 foot trees look like shrubs, the conical straw roofs of peasant huts like those silly umbrellas you sometimes get with a cocktail. There is no sign of human life, no trace of the world that was proceeding normally until the Limpopo raged out of control a week ago.
The monotony of the landscape is broken only by the trace of a former embankment under the water level, or a line of electricity poles that comes to a sudden end.
Down at the coast, we flew low over Xai-Xai (pronounced Shy-shy), which was a thriving tourist town (or as thriving as Mozambique gets). White tourists from across the border in South Africa used to flock here for the beach and the shark fishing, staying in the decaying finery of old mansions erected by the Portuguese.
Today, Xai-Xai is half a town. On the high ground to one side of the river, life is as it was a week ago, only more crowded.
The other side of Xai-Xai is gone. Most is completely submerged. Here and there, a metal roof shines brightly in the sun, water laps about the top of the church-door. The hundreds of people who fled to the bridge for safety have been cleared, and their place taken by livestock rescued from the strong currents of the river.
Our pilot, Rob Siegrist, a South African policeman on secondment, lands the helicopter in the governor's garden above the town. Baton-wielding policemen keep a large crowd at bay while we unload supplies of maize, sugar, water and rice. Mobile phones work, but food and fuel are in short supply. The town is cut off by road, the airstrip is under water and transporting supplies by helicopter is expensive.
Further up the river the South Africans are still plucking people from their lofty retreats. The down-draught from these enormous Oryx military helicopters is enormous. The rotors send tree-branches into a frenzy, scattering roofs and possessions into the muddy brown waters. To those being rescued, it must be a terrifying experience, something like the original cyclone that destroyed their lives. Then the winchman descends, straps them into a bucket seat and up they go.
Sometimes, people don't want to be rescued, or are too scared to approach the strange "bird" from the sky. If a farmer leaves his goats and chickens behind, he will almost certainly never see them again. One man has been offered a ride three times, but won't part from the goats he has tethered to the roof of his house. Sometimes, these things seem more important than staying alive.
There are thousands of trees and roofs dotted around this landscape, like islands in Clew Bay, so finding the survivors is never easy. Plucking up each person one by one can take over an hour; the largest group rescued yesterday was an extended family of 34 men, women and children.
Bronzed and white to a man, the South African army crews are the real heroes of this disaster. Half-a-dozen helicopters have rescued up to 10,000 stranded people, when no one else was around to help. It's been a case of Top Gun meets Out of Africa as South African military might, a relic of the apartheid era, is finally put to good use.
The irony is lost on no one: after all, it's barely more than a decade ago since white South Africa was launching attacks on Mozambique and fomenting civil war. "What these guys have done, it has made me proud to be a South African," one black South African cameraman said yesterday, as his jump-suited compatriots lunched on spam and conversed among themselves in Afrikaans.
But if the South Africans are here, where is the rest of the cavalry? There wasn't even a morsel of food for the survivors deposited in Chibuto, only a registration desk. Some enterprising soul had set up a stall to sell beer and soft drinks, but the only nourishment available under this copse of trees was from a mother's breast.
From here, the survivors were being herded on to the back of a truck, to be taken to a camp run by the World Food Programme. But many of those rescued were from near Xai-Xai, at least two days' walk from this camp in the best of weather.
One of the camps we saw later from the air consisted of nothing but a long roll of tarpaulin to provide shelter from the sun.
As was the case in Turkey's earthquake last year, the world has reacted too slowly to the disaster. The UN sent in an assessment team, then pulled it out before the worst flooding occurred. The team has been sent in again.
Once again, the media (along with the South Africans) were there first. Mozambique is swamped with long-term development workers, including all the main Irish agencies, but few have experience of this kind of emergency. While flood victims fight for their lives on tree-tops in the provinces, daily UN briefings in the capital draw attendances of more than 100 representatives of aid agencies and international organisations.
Aid agencies are still talking of bringing in boats to hunt for survivors, though the time for this kind of help is probably past. Anyway, with water levels falling in some areas, boats can get hopelessly trapped in the shallows, as a Dutch agency found to its cost yesterday.
Concern, Trocaire and GOAL have all drafted in extra personnel, and food and medical supplies are on the way. If the UN can create the right framework, the Irish agencies can help avert the looming medical crisis.