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.”
