Suffering in Zimbabwe

The Ncube family: Kwanele, 6, and Nomagugu, 5, are suffering from kwashiorkor, caused by severe malnutritionMartin Fletcher

Father Peter stopped his truck beside a cluster of thatched mud huts
deep in the arid, baking bushland of western Zimbabwe. A stick-thin
woman, barefoot and dressed in rags, approached with her two young
children.

Please. We're desperate for food, she told him, and lifted up her
children's filthy T-shirts. Their stomachs and belly buttons were
grotesquely distended by kwashiorkor, a condition caused by severe
malnutrition that just a few years ago was unheard of in this once
bountiful country.

The woman said she and her family were living off nuts and berries, for
which they spent hours foraging in the bush each day. She showed us
where her husband had buried their eldest daughter, who had died two
months ago aged 12 after eating berries that caused severe stomach
pains and made her vomit. This is madness – madness, Father Peter,
visibly upset, said.

The priest promised the family food and medical help from his
church-run clinic 12 miles away, then asked them to join him in prayer.
Lord, help us during these terrible times of hunger, he said. Give
us hope and courage. Heal these children. Bring food to our fields and
homes. Show us your love!

There is nothing exceptional about this family. Hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of families in this region are surviving on wild berries or
nuts that they grind into powder and mix with water, a weed called lude
that they boil into a thin soup. They also eat insects such as locusts,
if they can find them. Some even eat the moist inner fibres of bark.

Far away in Harare the Mugabe regime, and even Western nongovernment
organisations, deny that Zimbabweans are actually dying of hunger, but
here, more than 100 miles from any main population centre, they are
starving to death.

Father Peter, a local opposition councillor, and the clinic's chief
doctor told The Times that three adults and five children had died of
starvation in the past three months. Others had probably died
unrecorded, while hundreds more avoided death by starvation only
because they succumbed to fatal illness first.

People are starving here. The extent of the suffering has reached
Auschwitz proportions, Father Peter declared. The doctor, an
expatriate, added: It's a silent tsunami. They die so quietly. They
don't demonstrate or cry out or stand up. They just die.

The one mercy is that Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic has yet to reach this
area, but Father Peter is terrified that it will. So weak are the
people that cholera would sweep away hundreds, he said. It would be an
absolute catastrophe.

Father Peter is not his real name, and neither the clinic nor its
precise location can be identified for fear of government reprisals,
but the priest took the considerable risk of hosting an unaccredited
foreign journalist for 24 hours so the world could know more of the
evil that the regime is inflicting on its most helpless people.

The root cause was the regime's seizure and destruction of white-owned
farms, compounded by several years of drought. In 2000 Zimbabwe
produced 4.5 million tonnes of maize and other cereals. This year's
harvest was barely 800,000 tonnes in a country that needs two million
tonnes just to feed its own people.

The bankrupt Government pledged to import 800,000 tonnes, but has only
imported 175,000 tonnes. The cash-strapped World Food Programme (WFP),
which used to buy Zimbabwe's surpluses to alleviate famines elsewhere,
has to date imported only 260,000 of the 400,000 tonnes it promised.

That leaves a huge shortfall, and the WFP predicts that five million
Zimbabweans – half of the population – will need emergency food aid by
next month.

What you have is a very fine line between chronic malnutrition and
slipping over that line into something much worse, one Western
diplomat said.

And it is the poorest of the poor, those living far from the towns and
cities – and especially in an area like this, which the regime
considers an opposition stronghold – who pay the heaviest price. This
area received its first relief supplies, courtesy of Worldvision and
Christian Aid, last week.

When The Times visited this clinic in December 2007 it had only two
young children suffering from kwashiorkor or marasmus, another
potentially fatal condition caused by severe malnutrition. This time
there were ten, aged between 6 months and 7 years, but Father Peter
reckoned there are several times as many living out in the bush who
cannot reach the clinic.

A year ago we wrote that here, and across Zimbabwe, millions were
surviving on a single bowl of sadza- a cornmeal porridge – a day. Today
people here have not had sadza for months, and the doctor said they
arrived at the clinic having eaten nothing for a week.

People go shoeless. They are dressed in rags. They are emaciated,
listless, despairing. What little money they had was long ago rendered
worthless by hyperinflation. It is the planting season, but they have
no seeds – let alone fertiliser – and few have bothered to plough their
tiny fields.

In desperation some are selling their cows and other livestock to
hucksters from the cities, destroying any future they might have, for a
few kilograms of cornmeal that will sustain them just a few more weeks.

Dozens arrive at the clinic each day, begging for food. It provides
what it can, but even its hungry nurses went on strike last month to
demand some of the provisions set aside for patients. They argued that
the patients would die if the nurses died, said the doctor.

Anyone who can has left. Of the 35 teachers at the nearby junior and
high schools only five remain, and both institutions have ceased to
function. As those who stay grow steadily weaker they increasingly
succumb to Aids, tuberculosis, malaria and other illnesses.

Unable to afford proper funerals, families bury relatives in simple blankets near their huts.

The clinic receives funds and supplies from overseas, and is the only
hospital or medical centre still open for more than 70 miles in any
direction. What prevents it being completely overwhelmed is the almost
total lack of transport. The sick who are still strong enough arrive on
foot, or by donkey cart, but few buses still run and are unaffordable
in any case.

The clinic's policy is to send patients home before they die because,
says the doctor, it's more expensive to transport a dead body than a
living one. But its mortuary, nonetheless, is full with 14 bodies, and
those left unclaimed will eventually receive paupers' burials. That the
clinic keeps going is little short of a miracle, and entirely down to
help from overseas. It recently survived three weeks without
electricity, and intermittently runs out of water and diesel.

But the death, the suffering and the constant struggle to stay open exacts a heavy toll of those who work there.

The chief doctor had visibly aged over the past year, and looked exhausted. So did Father Peter.

It's very, very hard. It breaks me down. I've seen too much
suffering, he said. We were never trained for this sort of
priesthood. This is the priesthood of the concentration camps.