Maputo — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Sunday urged members of the Old Apostolic Church of Mozambique, one of the country's many protestant sects, to step up their support for people affected by drought, and for the victims of the AIDS epidemic.

Guebuza was speaking to the believers of this church at a Sunday service in the southern city of Matola.

He praised the agricultural and livestock programmes of the church, since through them "the Old Apostolic Church is participating directly in the fight against poverty in our country. With this initiative the church is creating opportunities for its followers to improve their living conditions".

He said he was aware that among the church's members are building technicians, and suggested that they could teach peasant households techniques for collecting and storing rain water.

"Some of the areas which are suffering from drought had some rainfall", said Guebuza. "But because this water was not harvested, it disappeared".

The President stressed that AIDS is killing many thousands of Mozambicans, mostly of productive age, and their deaths "lead to suffering and poverty in their families".

He encouraged the church to continue to work on AIDS prevention, and to mitigate the epidemic's impact, particularly on children who have lost their parents to the disease. Guebuza wanted to recover the tradition whereby orphans are cared for by their uncles, "and they feel at home because their cousins treat them as brothers, and their aunts and uncles as sons".

"Why are we talking about orphans today ?", he mused. "Are we no longer the same Mozambicans ?" In their message to the President the church leadership complained that an embargo was placed on building a new church in the outlying Maputo suburb of Magoanine, and has still not been lifted. They also complained of delays in processing documents so that the church can obtain title to the plots of land that it occupies. Such red tape, the said, hinder's the church's development efforts.