"This area used to be the breadbasket of the region," said Zivei
Kabungaidze, provincial coordinator of the Farm Orphan Support Trust
(FOST), a local NGO that assists orphans and vulnerable children in
farming communities. "Only about five out of 100 farms are still
growing commercially."
A small percentage of farm workers received plots and most lost their
jobs when formerly white-owned commercial farms were redistributed
during President Robert Mugabe’s fast-track land reform programme that
began in 2000.
Those who have remained on the farms mainly survive by piece-work and
gold panning, but living standards have plummeted and basic social
services like farm schools and clinics no longer exist. "Life is very
difficult in farm communities," said Kabungaidze, and HIV/AIDS is
making the lives of the children FOST supports even harder.
At Umzi Farm outside Bindura, a few small plots of maize and vegetables
grown by former farm workers and their families compete with the grass,
but Maria Macuculi’s* plot is completely overgrown.
Like many former farm workers allotted land, she cannot afford seed and
fertiliser to cultivate it. These days, she also lacks the strength to
carry water from the river about a kilometre away.
Macuculi, who like many former farm workers is originally from
Mozambique, learned she was HIV positive after losing her husband to
tuberculosis (TB) four years ago. She has been getting free
antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) at a clinic in nearby Glendale for the past
three years, but she often struggles to find food to take with them.
"At times I go to bed without having any food, and then I don’t take my
ARVs."
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) helps local NGOs like FOST to support
vulnerable farm children with school and medical fees, home visits by
trained community members, and skills training for older children, but
political violence in recent years has made NGOs and donors reluctant
to venture onto resettled farms with much needed food aid.
At times I go to bed without having any food, and then I don’t take my
ARVs"We’ve not been able to raise funding to provide food to our
home-based care patients, and it is a problem for many of them to take
medication when they don’t have a balanced diet," said Godfrey
Magaramombe, director of Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe, another NGO
funded by UNICEF.
Mercy Dimbi* has lived on Umzi farm since she was a girl, when her
father started working there. She and her daughter, Esther*, 9, have
been on ARVs since 2002, but Esther still has continuous headaches and
bouts of flu, and Dimbi looks weak and undernourished.
She has attended some of the FOST training on livelihood development
but does not have the strength to work the land, so she knits jerseys
for her neighbours in exchange for maize and sends her daughter, 14, to
look for firewood to sell. None of her three children and one
grandchild is in school.
A national farm health programme run by the Ministry of Health and
Child Welfare used to train community members to provide basic health
services, but it stopped when the land reform programme began and most
farm clinics closed. "Many people don’t have money for public transport
to travel to hospitals," said Magaramombe, whose organisation is among
several NGOs trying to fill the gap by training their own community
health workers.
Esther, also a resident of Umzi Farm, is the second wife of former farm
worker Antonio Fanuel, who has TB. He says he was tested for HIV but
never learned the result because he could not afford to return to the
hospital. Esther is underweight and suffers from chest pains, while her
18-month-old child has diarrhoea, but she has no money to go to the
hospital for TB or HIV tests.
"The Farm Health Programme is one of those services that must come back
to life, especially with everything that happened during the land
reform programme," said Dr Henry Madzorera, a member of the former
opposition Movement for Democratic Change and health minister in
Zimbabwe’s new unity government.
In the short term, the ministry plans to use mobile clinics and village
health workers to provide farm communities with basic health services
and health education but, eventually, said Madzorera, "We must have a
clinic within a five kilometre radius of every settlement."
*Not their real names
PlusNEWS/IRIN
Post published in: News