The rain began after Sabbath. At first, it was gentle. Familiar. The kind of rain that whispers promises of harvest and renewal. But then, it changed.

It was February 2000 in Chokwe, a bustling town in Gaza province, where Pastor Antonio Cuchata rested with his family after a beautiful Sabbath service, unaware that the heavens were about to open in catastrophic fury. In the middle of the night, the floodwaters came without mercy, swallowing homes, uprooting lives, turning Gaza province into a watery wasteland.

Twenty-four years later, Pastor Cuchata still hears it. That sound. Rain hammering their bodies as they ran for higher ground. The relentless, thunderous roar of water that refused to stop, refused to show mercy, refused to discriminate between the faithful and the faithless.

“I woke my family up, and we began to run, leaving everything behind” he says.

But in the chaos of that desperate flight through darkness, their nine-year-old son vanished. Gone. Swallowed by the night, the confusion, the crush of panicked bodies all scrambling toward salvation.

There was no time to stop. No time for a search and rescue mission. The water was rising. Death was

chasing. And Pastor Cuchata had four other children who needed him to keep moving.

“I believed we would find him,” he says quietly. Faith, when there was nothing else left.

As morning broke on the second day, exhausted and still running, they saw another group fleeing toward higher ground. And there, in that crowd of strangers, their son.

“It was a miracle from God that we found him.”

The reunion was brief. The journey continued, 15 kilometres through rising waters, each step a prayer, each breath a defiance of despair. Exhausted and desperate, on the fourth day, salvation arrived in the form of a massive Marula tree, its thick branches stretching skyward like arms of refuge.

There, the family of seven collapsed. For four days, that tree became their home, their fortress, their altar. “My Pathfinder skills kicked in”, Cuchata recalls. “I used the branches and parts of our clothes to make a rope to help pull the children up.”

Four days. No food. No clean water. Only the murky floodwaters below to keep them from dying of thirst. The family clung to those branches, bodies weak, spirits tested, faith stretched to its breaking point.

Then, on the fifth day, as if their ordeal hadn’t been harrowing enough, five snakes emerged from the water. They swam steadily toward the tree, their bodies cutting through the brown current with deadly purpose. One by one, they began climbing.

“We prayed for the snakes not to come to us” Cuchata says, chuckling at the memory now, though the fear must have been paralysing then. And the snakes, miraculously, diverted to a different branch, settling there as if an invisible hand had redirected them.

Another day passed. Finally, the water subsided.

The family climbed down from their refuge and walked back toward what had been their home. It was gone. Completely washed away. Everything they had built, everything they owned, was erased.

There was nothing to return to. So they began walking again. Another 20 kilometres in search of shelter, their bodies depleted, their feet blistered and raw. Along the way, they encountered another pastor who had been searching for them. He led them to a displacement centre in Biline, where they would live for the next three years.

“Many people died” Cuchata says solemnly. “But Jesus saved us.”

Reflecting on the events of 2000, Pastor Cuchata draws a connection to one of the Bible’s most enduring stories. “The distance I walked, the trials I faced, it made me think of Noah and the flood” he says. “That tree was provided by God. It was steady, and we feared nothing.”

The floods tested everything he believed. His faith. His strength. His calling. But through it all, he saw the hand of God in the tree that held them, in the son who was found, in the snakes that turned away, in the survival of his family when so many others perished.

Pastor Cuchata retired in January 2025 after 45 years of meaningful ministry. The floods of 2000 remain one of the most defining moments of his life, a real test of faith and endurance. But looking back, he sees not just tragedy, but testimony.

God was in the storm. And God brought them through. Today, when the rains come to Mozambique, Pastor Cuchata no longer fears them. He has already survived the worst. And he knows who holds the waters in His hands.