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| Features |
| More than a hunger crisis |
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by
Isaac Masingati, 30 December 2005
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06:13:41
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The two graves lie in a solitary village cemetery — one next to the other. The first one, the shorter one, is a diminutive hump of gravel covered with a green bush of grass. Under it, lie remains of a two-year-old baby-girl, Nazombe.
In the longer and more pronounced one rests the body of Nazi, Nazombe’s mother both of Namandwa Village, Traditional Authority Mkhumba in Phalombe. Together, side by side, mother and daughter, they have become the living truth of how cruel hunger can be.
Nazombe and her mother (may their souls Rest In Peace) died in 2004 at the peak of a food crisis that claimed many more lives. The child, malnourished, and the mother, too starved to breast-feed, silently succumbed to the dreaded hunger.
People of Namandwa mourned and buried two people they loved. And yet, just when they were forgetting the death of the mother and child, the feared glared its venomous fangs again in 2005 reducing people of this starved village and its neighbours to eaters of wild bitter leaves and strange insects and roots.
A visit to the local nutritional centre at Mpasa, and you stare into eyes that see nothing but death. Sickly babies that look too old for their ages and too bloated for their tiny limbs, sit on their mothers’ laps waiting for bowls of porridge to nourish the precious life. They come dying and are rushed 15 kilometres to Holy Family Mission Hospital where big tubes are inserted into their veins and noses to pump food into their tiny bodies.
Their mothers, equally starved, spend the endless hours of waiting, listening to the grumblings of their own empty stomachs. As you walk among them, a little girl of three begins to whimper and the mother, having nothing to offer, tosses an emaciated breast at her — more as a playing thing than a natural feeding tube.
Thirty kilometres away at Limbuli in Mulanje bordering Mozambique, hundreds of hunger-ridden villagers lie on their backs in the sweltering heat of the sun sharing mangoes with big green flies. They have been here since morning waiting for relief food and, as each minute ticks by, they grow weaker and more desperate.
There is an oddity of quietude among them. Not that there are no issues to talk about. Rather, because they have no energy to make any noise. As I stare at the helpless mothers staring in the direction of the district headquarters where the relief food will come from, a 35-year-old woman steps forward and offers me her eight-year-old daughter for a housegirl.
It is then that jeeps groaning under heavy bags of relief maize emerge from the west and hell breaks loose as the old and weak garner the last ounce of energy to be on the starting line. The World Food Programme (WFP) brings these people, through Oxfam, relief food once every month and so the people hang onto life.
“The situation here is desperate,” says Oxfam programme manager for Mulanje District Felix Mtonda.
According to Oxfam, out of 156,230 farming families in the district, 122,492 are in dire need of food representing 78 percent. This figure is higher from last year by 18 percent when out of 149,781 farming families, only 89,822 had no food representing 60 percent.
Hunger in the district has been aggravated by natural calamities. There was draught last year and tea estates, which provide employment to the people, ended up with dry tea stamps that could not bear any leaves and the employers had no choice but to lay off everyone.
People lost their jobs. Some crossed the borders to try a new life in Mozambique only to discover that hunger had not spared the once war-torn country. So they came back and now, together with their kins, they spend days eating mangoes and praying that WFP includes them on the beneficiaries roll.
And, as if that was not enough, the district was hit by maize mildew, a devastating disease that spares no plant that belongs to the maize family.
The two factors have rendered lives of these people miserable. And worse, although government insists that there is maize in Admarc markets, there is never enough for everyone.
“People now depend on private traders who sell the grain at K40.50 per kg when they could buy the same at K17.50 per kg at Admarc. Very few can afford that,” says Mtonda.
Sixty-five year old Dinnes Masanza of Lumwila Village has been criss-crossing the borders looking for food and has just realised the trips would only cost him the energy he desperately needs at this critical time. He now patronises distribution centres hoping that one day he would receive food.
“I have stayed one week without eating nsima but mangoes. It’s only for God’s mercy that I live,” he says.
Not that everyone believes in praying. The food crisis has also affected God’s work. The more people get hungry, the more they see less sense going to church on empty stomach.
Pastor Master Khumbiwa of Miracle Pentecostal Church in the district confides how tough it is to convert non-believers in times of a famine when you have no food to offer.
Church attendance, he says, has gone down from 500 to 150 also hitting the offering plate where offerings have dropped from K400 during times of plenty to K60.
“It is as if no-one cares about God any more. It is as if God is responsible for all this but He is not; He is the all-loving and all-caring, Creator of heavens and earth and all that is in it,” he recites.
Linda Mwachande, a health surveillance assistant for Muloza Zone, understands why the Lord’s work is suffering and why people like Khumbiwa are losing their flock. People in the area, she says, are too malnourished to be participative.
Mwachande says feeding centres in the zone are registering new cases of malnourished people, including adults everyday. She says figures of people seeking nutritional rehabilitation have shot from 80 per centre to 250.
“You would not expect someone who has not had nsima for a week to go to church when he or she should be scavenging for food,” she observes.
Mwachande says in some cases six-year-olds who were walking have stopped and are being carried like babies and that school attendance has gone down in the 15 villages she supervises.
Although there are no reports of people directly dying of hunger in the district, Mwachande feels there are many hunger-related deaths going on, only that people have come to consider such deaths as normal.
The surveillance assistant tells a story of a woman whose two-year-old child she referred to a nutrition centre last week. When she met her this week she was told the child had died.
The situation is a great concern to Sub Village Head Namaona who says the food shortage is affecting development projects in the area. He says the relief food being distributed is too selective and too little as such people are too weak to participate in development activities effectively.
Namaona says out of 420 households in his area, only 99 are benefiting.
“What this means is that the maize the 99 households receive is shared among 420 households because of our extended family system,” he says.
WFP admits that almost everyone needs relief food but that the resources are limited to meet the demand. WFP, through village relief committees, selects critical cases to benefit from the targeted food distribution programme. It has also established emergency school feeding programmes, theoretical feeding centres and nutritional centres for under-five children.
At least 4.7 million out of 12 million Malawians are in critical need of relief food, half of which is being provided for by the WFP.
As the beneficiaries struggle with bags of maize the organisation has distributed, you can still see the uncertainty and desperation on their faces. The 50 kg bag will be finished before the end of the week and they will wait for another three weeks with mangoes contributing the major ratio to their diet. |
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