The girls giggle nervously as they talk about their hunger. Their grades have plummeted. They fall asleep in class from exhaustion. Often, when they have nothing at all to eat, they don’t even bother coming to school.
”Sometimes it’s better to stay home than to come and collapse here,” Litsoanelo Moyo, a 19-year-old student at Nhwali secondary school, said on Saturday.
Zimbabwe’s worst food crisis in a decade has begun to take its toll on the village of Nhwali, 700 kilometres southwest of Harare.
Many now eat only one small meal a day. The poorest are forced to beg for a handful of corn meal from their neighbors. Child malnutrition has more than doubled to eight percent.
And teachers and students at the local schools worry about the damage this is doing to the education system.
At the beginning of the year, the school enrolled 450 students. More than 50 have dropped out because their families have stolen across the border to South Africa, they were forced to help scavenge for food or their parents no longer could afford the 1 280 Zimbabwean dollars (about $2) in school fees, said Soneni Dube, the deputy headmaster.
Of the remaining students, about 50 are absent on any given day, up from one or two in normal times. Those that come are often too hungry to study.
One girl fainted in the middle of a class. Teachers gave her some food, but she dropped out a few days later.
The schoolgirls talk of their dreams – of being nurses, a journalist, a stewardess.
But they are more fixated on their hunger.
”I used to be fat,” laughs Itumeleng Mdlongwa, a petite 17-year-old girl.
It is noon on a weekend day and they have walked between two and 10 kilometres to school to hold a study group on the history of Europe’s colonisation of Africa. Not one of them has anything more in her stomach than black tea.
The girls used to eat two hearty meals a day of meat, corn mash and vegetables and a small lunch. Now, when they are lucky, they get two small meals of corn mash and the rabe or spinach they grow in small gardens in their yards. When the government trucks selling corn don’t come for a while – and they haven’t been to Nhwali for months – they get only one meal, sometimes just vegetables.
Their grades have plunged.
Nontokoza Moyo (16) passed six subjects last term. Now she is
only passing three. ”When I’m reading, I sleep,” she said. ”We don’t normally concentrate much these days.”
Dube is worried that his teachers are at risk of falling through the cracks in the shaky food delivery system. They are too wealthy to get food aid and are not official residents of any of the cluster of nearby villages, so never make it onto the lists to buy scarce government grain.
”Even if we have the money, we don’t have the grain to buy,” he said. ”Morale is very low. Very, very low.”
An estimated six million of Zimbabwe’s 12,5-million people are threatened by a hunger crisis caused by a terrible drought and the government’s chaotic land reform program, which has badly wounded its agriculture-based economy, according to the World Food Program.
Nearly seven million people in five other countries in southern Africa are also at risk of starvation. There are no accurate figures for hunger-related deaths.
WFP head James Morris, who is touring the region to inspect the crisis, appealed on Friday for donor nations to increase their contributions to help head off a potential disaster in the region.
The agency, which is currently delivering 10 000 metric tons a month to Zimbabweans, hopes to increase that to 55 000 tons. They predict the situation will get much worse in the coming months.
Meanwhile, human rights groups accuse the government, which sells corn at the fixed price of 555 Zimbabwean dollars (less than $1) for a 50 kilogram bag, of refusing to sell grain to opposition supporters and making only sporadic deliveries to opposition strongholds.
The government denies its land reform policies are to blame for food shortages, saying drought is the sole cause. It also denies allegations that it is denying the opposition food.
When Morris arrived in Nhwali to inspect the distribution of WFP corn, an unprecedented seven government trucks filled with bags of corn for sale rolled up, the first time since July that even one truck has arrived to feed the 9 000 people in the area, deep in opposition territory.
Janet Siziba, a 73-year-old widow, waits in line with money she has borrowed from a kind neighbor to buy corn to feed herself, her grandson, his wife and their two children.
She and her grandson used to feed the family off the harvest from their tiny field and the earnings they made by making bricks for neighbors. But their field produced nothing this year, and no one has money to pay them for piecework.
So she begs door to door for small handfuls of grain and watches fearfully as her one and four-year-old great grandchildren grow weaker.
Siziba says she has not even bothered to plow her tiny field for the upcoming planting season, which frightens aid workers who hope the crisis will end with the next harvest.
”Where will I get the money to get the seed,” she said. – Sapa-AP