AMBA, Mozambique -- A strong breeze picked up the sand-like dirt and whipped it across the bleak, flat bush, right through the thickly bunched reeds that form the walls of most of the houses.
The incessant wind blowing beneath a gray sky seemed to accentuate the poverty that grips this country, among the world's poorest. But it could not take the small smile of satisfaction off the face of Natalia Chachaio.
She had come home to this village about 50 miles northwest of the country's capital, Maputo, eight years after the cruelty of war drove her into exile in South Africa.
It was not a job or money that brought her back; it was the fact that one of the world's poorest countries is producing one of Africa's most precious commodities: good news.
"When the war came to this part of Mozambique, the soldiers burned my house," Mrs. Chachaio said. "We had to run away."
She left with six children. She returned with nine and a tenth on the way, traveling in a truck of the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, which has helped re-settle many of the 1.1 million who have returned out of the 1.5 million people who fled across Mozambique's borders into South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Swaziland.
The United Nations gives returnees like Mrs. Chachaio enough food for two weeks, some seeds, pots and farming implements. Her husband, who works as a gardener at a school in South Africa, will come in December.
"When we heard that things had changed with the war, we decided to come home," said Mrs. Chachaio.
This week, Mozambicans go to the polls for their first free election, the climax of a shaky but seemingly inexorable process that began two years ago with the signing of a peace agreement between the government and rebel forces.
The fight between those two forces -- known by their Portuguese acronyms, the government's FRELIMO, Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, and the rebels' RENAMO, the National Resistance Movement of Mozambique -- had gone on since the country won independence from Portugal in 1975.
It was a brutal war, taking the lives of perhaps a million of the country's 15 million citizens.
In addition to the 1.5 million who left the country, a similar number are thought to have moved within Mozambique.
RENAMO, a right-wing group supported by the government of Rhodesia until that country became black-ruled Zimbabwe, and then by South Africa, was infamous for its tactics of executions and maimings to gain control of the countryside.
It adopted a scorched-earth policy, and today officials repatriating refugees often say that they return to remote villages that have been devastated.
For its part, FRELIMO, while making impressive strides in social services, made many enemies, banning multiparty elections and stubbornly clinging to the Marxist ideology that dictated its unpopular, and sometimes brutal, opposition to the country's traditional tribal leaders and beliefs.
In the end, with this poor country ravaged by war and finally by drought, peace seemed to come as much from exhaustion as any other source.
Perhaps the best news for Mozambique's future came from a part of the peace process that didn't work out as planned. The country's new army was supposed to have had 30,000 soldiers, divided equally between FRELIMO and RENAMO troops.
But when it came time to form that force, no one could find 30,000 people willing to serve. The new army will probably have about a third that number.
More than 70,000 soldiers took a demobilization package of 18 months' pay -- about $300 -- and, like Mrs. Chachaio, headed home. They had had enough of fighting.
"This is a really good sign," Aldo Ajello, head of the United Nations mission in Mozambique, said of the failure to fill the new army's ranks. "It shows that people are really fed up with war. They want to go home."
Democracy does not come cheap in Mozambique. The United Nations is clearly the country's biggest industry. It has about 4,500 troops here and another 1,500 civilian personnel. White U.N. vehicles seem to make up most of the traffic on the roads.
The price tag is $1 million a day, with the United States picking up just under a third of that. Counting other aid programs and embassy costs, American taxpayers alone put about a half-million dollars a day into this country.
The return appears to be the type of stability that has eluded so many African countries, such as Somalia, Rwanda and Angola.
The specter of Angola looms most ominously over Mozambique.
Both were Portuguese colonies granted independence in the mid-1970s and then immediately thrust into years of warfare between leftist governments and right-wing rebels. Though it never attracted the kind of attention from the global superpowers that the fighting in oil- and diamond-rich Angola did, the conflict in Mozambique reflected the regional realities of the global ideological struggle as first Rhodesia and then South Africa financed the rebels' fight against their leftist government.
In both Angola and Mozambique, it was the end of the Cold War that dried up both Communist support for the governments and right-wing support for the rebels, leading to negotiated settlements. But in Angola, a carefully brokered peace accord fell apart following elections two years ago.
The lesson was not lost on the United Nations. Plans for Mozambique were immediately beefed up. Much more attention was paid to the demobilization of the two armies, something that was not properly supervised in Angola.
U.N. troop levels were raised to a number that could effectively enforce the settlement, not just the handful of observers in Angola who stood by helplessly when the fighting resumed.
And, perhaps most important, Mr. Ajello, previously a U.N. development official, was given a free hand to use all the skills he developed during a decade in Sicilian politics to bring the process to a successful conclusion.
The two years have been marked by bluster and posturing on both sides, delays and foot-dragging, a few mutinies by frustrated soldiers at demobilization points, and many threats of calling the whole thing off.
But in each case, the settlement came with money, not bullets. For instance, a trust fund was set up to pay for the transformation of RENAMO into a political organization. The party is now run out of two of the nicest houses in Maputo, the country's beautifully situated seaside capital.
Indeed, many think that should RENAMO's leader, Alfonso Dhlakama, lose the election -- as expected -- one reason he will not follow the same path back to war is that he has gotten used to his luxurious lifestyle, preferring it to the 16 years he spent in the bush.
An easy-going man with a broad smile and a natural charisma, Mr. Dhlakama, 41, belies RENAMO's image as a ruthless guerrilla organization.
"I am not worried about how I will go down in Mozambique history," he said recently. "If I win or lose, I know that I am the person who brought multiparty democracy to my country. That is enough."
It is not clear that it is possible to have a genuinely fair election in Mozambique under any circumstances. Its more than 300,000 square miles that sprawl up the southeastern coast of Africa were exploited and otherwise neglected by the Portuguese before being devastated by war.
They contain hardly any of the transportation and communication infrastructure needed for effective campaigning. Illiteracy is estimated at 80 percent. Less than 40 percent of the country has access to radio, only a tiny percentage to television.
Perhaps a quarter of Mozambicans speak Portuguese, with the rest divided among eight other African languages.
Many parts of the country have never known modern advances, such as education, health care or transportation.
Despite these obstacles, the country's new nonpartisan election commission finished a successful, if delayed, registration campaign, getting more than 6 million people signed up, close to the commission's goal.
The campaign is under way in force, with the vote set for Thursday and Friday.
But even the head of the election commission, Brazao Mazula, has no illusions that Mozambicans will fully understand democratic principles by the time they vote.
Instead, he talks of building an "electoral culture" on the foundation of the fact that democracy brought peace, gradually changing the way people make decisions in their communities and their country.
"Once democratic values are established, they will be absorbed by the population as time goes by," Dr. Mazula said.
One of the main problems in new democracies is that while everyone loves winning elections, no one is properly prepared to lose.
"We try to avoid the word 'lose,' " said Dr. Mazula. "Because to be a loser in Mozambican culture is to be hated, to be no good. We try to educate people that there are no losers in democracy, that we are all winners."
The pragmatic side of that will be if the new government, no matter who wins, incorporates officials from both FRELIMO and RENAMO.
Though neither side will formally agree to that before the election, it is being pushed by many in the international community, including the United States.
In what was virtually a lecture to Mozambican leaders this summer, U.S. Ambassador Dennis Jett said that among the questions voters will be asking before the election is, "Has stability been ensured by making the arrangements necessary to share power or is stability threatened by those who only seek to accumulate power?"
While everything is going fairly smoothly, Mozambique still faces difficult days.
The country remains awash in guns, and there is a real danger that gangs of bandits will try to control some areas, threatening the thin veneer of nationality imposed in the early days of the FRELIMO government.
But, in the end, the country's poverty may help guarantee the peace. For now, Mozambicans seem more interested in selling their AK-47s to South Africans than shooting anyone with them.
And, unlike Angola, where the government underwrites its expenses with oil revenues while the opposition trades diamonds for its weapons, Mozambique has little of value to sell to finance further fighting.
All it has is people, and they seem tired of fighting.
They just want to go home.
HISTORY OF MOZAMBIQUE
Country: Republic of Mozambique
Capital: Maputo
Area: 303,073 square miles.
Population: 15.5 million
Religion: Traditional animist-60%, Christian-30%, Islamic-10%
History: First penetrated by Arabs in 10th century.
1498 -- Portugese explorer Vasco da Gama lands.
1505 -- Portugese trade begins in slaves and ivory.
1885 -- Declared formal Portugese colony.
1961 -- Armed resistance begins against Portugese.
1973 -- 40,000 Portugese troops in war against guerrillas.
1974 -- Civil war between Marxist governement and Moz. Nat. Resistance. Severe drought and economic mismanagement led to malnutrition and suffering.
1975 -- Portugal grants full independence.
1989 -- Crease-fire decalred in civil war.
1994 -- First free election scheduled.