TICA, Mozambique — Hundreds of villagers labored under a blazing sun on Thursday to salvage what they could from cornfields that just days earlier were submerged by storm-driven floodwaters.

With the waters from Cyclone Idai starting to recede, it was time to take stock, and in Tica, a central Mozambique village where many of the residents are subsistence farmers, the news was not good. Homes, clothes and crops — all vanished.

“Everything we have is gone,” said Armindo Fernando Lazaro, 52, a father of eight who was taking shelter at the Muda Mufo Complete School.

For aid agencies, the water’s retreat allowed better access to scores of communities that had been cut off by the cyclone, which hit last Thursday, and by the floods that followed.