Zimbabwe ravaged by hunger and disease

As international efforts continue to coax Zimbabwe’s divided political leaders into a workable power-sharing agreement, the country’s long-suffering citizens sink ever deeper into a spiral of hunger and desperation. Freelance writer Michelle Smith reports

The greatest crisis in Zimbabwe is not political. The greatest crisis in Zimbabwe is not financial. The greatest crisis in Zimbabwe is humanitarian. As the world contemplates and debates who should be at the head of government or how power should be divided between parties, Zimbabweans are dying.

A meal or less a day

Patricia Walsh of the Dominican Missionary Sisters in Harare put the disaster into context. “For the past 35 years I have worked as a nurse here in Zimbabwe, many of those years spent in rural areas where we experienced severe droughts but until now I have not experienced the degree of hunger/starvation that I am seeing today.”

“Millions of Zimbabweans have already run out of food or are surviving on just one meal a day,” Mustapha Darboe, a World Food Program Regional Director confirmed in an appeal for food aid funds.

A meal in Zimbabwe, for those who manage to eat one, can consist of any number of things, especially in rural areas where people survive on items as basic as wild fruit or scavenged roots.

Teachers say that they are too hungry to teach. Students say that they are too hungry to go to school. Healthcare workers are fighting hunger to help patients with hunger-related illnesses. And for those with HIV and AIDS, this food crisis is a double whammy.

Studies show that people who are hungry are less likely to stick to their anti-retroviral therapy. According to Patricia Walsh, many hungry teenagers confirmed such findings saying that they stopped taking their medication because it makes them too hungry and there is no food.

Pass on a glass of water

What Zimbabweans often get from their taps is a smelly green discharge residents told The Zimbabwean, an independent newspaper. Yet another consequence of the economic-political crisis is the increasingly scarce access to clean water.

First, Zimbabweans were dealing with water cutbacks. Then, they had to juggle standing sewage from burst and unrepaired pipes, blocked toilets and drains, and a reservoir that the Zimbabwe National Water Authority flushed raw sewage into. Now, they have to deal with the suffering and death caused by cholera.

“As a ministry, we are worried by the way, the disease is spreading across the country,” David Parirenyatwa, the Health and Child Welfare Minister, said in response to the cholera outbreak.

Despite the reality that many Zimbabweans struggle to get any water and many others are forced to use shallow wells and other contaminated sources, Parirenyatwa urged Zimbabweans to maintain high standards of hygiene, by washing their fruits and vegetables and boiling their drinking water.

Conditions could get much worse

The UN World Food Programme predicts that by early 2009, it will be vital to provide food aid to 45 per cent of the population.

UNICEF fears that worsening malnutrition conditions could be even closer, as Zimbabwe approaches what it says is the “lean season, when food stocks run low before the next harvest.”

Another impending threat for Zimbabweans is the beginning of the rainy season. If sanitation remains in the state that it is in now, not only is the cholera outbreak likely to get worse, but there are also high possibilities of other outbreaks.