The 43-year-old widow, whose home was destroyed during Zimbabwe's blitz to "rid the cities of slums and grime and build people decent homes" in May 2005 now lives in a shack fashioned from the base of a broken bed, doors taken from a car wreck and pieces of asbestos and plastic sheets.

"It's been a year since Murambatsvina ("Drive out filth") and where are the decent houses they said they would build us?" Gondo asked in the slum sprouting along Mukuvisi River on the outskirts of the capital Harare.

"We are now like refugees in our own country. My home which they destroyed was by far, far better than this," she added, pointing at her shack.

Gondo's makeshift home leaks when it rained and does not provide enough cover from the cold, she told AFP.

One of her twin sons died at three months in January of a respiratory ailment and she feared her remaining child will suffer a similar fate.

Zimbabwean authorities launched Operation Murambatsvina on May 18 last year, calling it an attempt to clean up the capital and other towns of hawkers and knock down illegal buildings.

But a United Nations report afterwards said it left 700,000 homeless and destitute -- mainly the country's poorest -- when shacks, houses, market stalls and shops were razed.

The operation also deprived at least a million people of their means of livelihood and has since became known as the "tsunami".

Despite a much-vaunted follow-up operation called "Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle" or "Live Well", meant to provide a better life to those whose homes or shops were destroyed, tens of thousands were still living in makeshift homes at various locations across the country.

At Hopley Farm, on the southern fringes of Harare, at least 1,600 families were "living in crowded conditions and in many cases makeshift shelters with plastic sheeting, thereby increasing their vulnerability to health problems such as scabies and pneumonia," a Medecins Sans Frontiers' (MSF) team reported in Harare.

"There has been no improvement in the lives of the people at Hopley," added Forbes Matonga, director of Christian Care, whose organisation has been providing poor families at the settlement with monthly rations of corn, beans and cooking oil since June last year.

"These people have no jobs or any other means of livelihood so this is going to be a case of timeless humanitarian intervention. We have no idea when we are going to stop this feeding programme."

In Hatcliffe Extension, near the city's posh Borrowdale suburb, between 10,000 and 15,000 people live in makeshift shacks on plots where their former homes were razed to the ground.

For Zione Chibwenzi, a 29-year-old woman who calls a one-metre plastic and brick shack home, hope for a better life is slowly fading.

"We believed the government officials when they claimed that they had destroyed our homes to build us better ones," Chibwenzi told AFP.

"We don't expect anything anymore."

Housing Minister Ignatius Chombo said in aftermath of the demolition that the government would build 150,000 new houses on plots by mid-October.

At Hatcliffe Extension, residents said no more than 150 houses had been allocated to displaced families when construction stopped in October.

The new houses have no windows, electricity or functioning toilets.

President Robert Mugabe said at the country's 26th independence celebrations last month that 3,325 houses were completed and allocated to beneficiaries last year under the first phase of Operation Garikai.

He said the rebuilding project would continue with local authorities providing plots for people to build their own houses.

But the majority of the victims of the demolitions lack the means and materials to build their own houses.

Civic groups say the reconstruction effort launched the day a UN envoy arrived in Zimbabwe to assess the humanitarian impact of the crackdown, was "piecemeal" and hastily embarked on.

"Operation Garikai, supposedly the reconstruction programme, has failed to provide decent alternative accommodation structures to the real victims," Housing the People of Zimbabwe, a humanitarian group, said in a statement.

"The effects of Operation Murambatsvina are still visible in both urban and rural settings and are a permanent reminder of the insensitivity of the perpetrators."

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