ninme

I shan’t be uploading this picture. Click through if you want to see. Reminds me of the pictures from Ethiopia in the 80s.

Telegraph – Zimbabwe families forced to beg for scraps

“It’s just that I can’t find the food that will make my baby grow”, said the mother of an 18-month-old boy who weighed just 11lb (5kg).

Another child howled in pain as she sat on her mother’s lap. Her skin was raw and pink as if she had been severely burned. The ward sister explained: “It is the most extreme form of kwashioka – vitamin deficiency.” The child was so malnourished that she was literally losing her hair and skin.

When I visited the same mission hospital in Zimbabwe two years ago, there were as many children and mothers in the paediatric ward. But mothers were spooning the staple, mealie meal, and gravy into the mouths of their malnourished children.

In a country that was already in a state of economic collapse, there was still something positive and hopeful in their actions and in the bustle of staff. This time, the same ward was filled with hopelessness and despair. …

According to the World Health Organisation, Zimbabwe now has the world’s lowest life expectancy – 37 years for a man, 34 for a woman.

Funerals are about the only growth industry. Drive past the main cemetery in the capital Harare and you see several groups of people singing hymns and saying prayers around tiny, freshly dug graves.

Joe, Solomon and Patience are the names of just three of the recently buried children here. Mourners said the cemetery had doubled in size in the past eight years, since President Robert Mugabe began his deliberate policy of destroying his country and his people.

Tell me again that poverty is a problem in this country. I dare you.