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October 12, 2002, Saturday STARVED OF HOPE Gethin Chamberlain In a land of marshes, where the Shire river runs south through Malawi towards the Mozambique Channel, lives a crocodile. He is old and well versed in the ways of the women who come to the marshes every day to collect the lilies which they will pound with a pestle into a thick gruel to feed their families, the only meal they will have today, the only meal they have had for many months. The women cross a flat plain of baked mud before entering the reeds and wading into the water. Cows graze and fish eagles hunt overhead. The only sign that the crocodile is there is the stream of bubbles coming from his snout as he paddles slowly below the surface. If the women spot the bubbles, they will run. This has happened to him before. He waits, deciding. Now he accelerates, breaking the surface as he swims purposefully towards her, unswerving as a torpedo. Jaw closes on bone. The other women are screaming, but he ignores them. The movement beneath him slows, stops and he tugs the lifeless body back into the water, away from the commotion on the bank. On the shore, the women ask each other what they saw. They saw nothing, they say. One moment she was there; the next, gone. They wait for her to surface, but the water is still. After a while, they move back into the water, and continue to collect the lilies. In Nyaika village in southern Malawi, where Magetsi lives, 14 people have died since this hunger began, taken by the crocodiles. Magetsi and her husband Petulo have three children and another on the way. The people here are among the poorest in Malawi. To survive famine, they eat nyika, a water lily growing under the water. To harvest the nyika, they wade into the waters of the Shire for up to six hours a day, risking not only crocodiles, but bilharzia, a disease caused by parasitic worms, and leeches. "We go to look for lilies every day because we don't have any alternative. It is the only food available to us free. Even if we see our friends attacked, we go back into the water. After all, what else shall we eat? The lily is not a tasty dish, but we have no option," says Magetsi. "We believe that one day we will be caught by a crocodile," she continues. "When we go there it is as if we have already signed our death certificates. "We used to eat maize. But now the rain is erratic and our leaders don't take into consideration the plight of the common people. We feel forsaken." The village cannot escape the famine which threatens the lives of 3.3 million of Malawis and another 15 million across southern Africa. Political incompetence and bureaucratic interference have played their part; the country's grain reserves were privatised in 1999 at the insistence of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, then sold off last year to repay debts on the orders of the IMF, just as the crops failed. Bad luck has been this way too, droughts scorching the crops and floods flattening them and washing away the top-soil. Once Malawi had grain reserves to last it five years, was even able to export some of its produce. Now the huge silos which dominate the skyline outside the capital are empty. Phikani Balayi and his wife Agatha have seen famine before, but nothing to compare with the calamity which threatens to engulf them now. They have ten children and five grandchildren, but in a decade they have seen eight more grandchildren die. Phikani is the oldest man in his village, a place where people have been reduced to eating mice and seeds. He has retained his dignity, his beard greying but neat, his clothes worn but expertly patched. His house is large compared to many of the others, several huts inside a straw palisade which also encompasses a stable for oxen and two round wicker maize granaries. All these are empty. When the first famine came, in 1949, he was just 19. It is different this time, he says. Before you could at least try to find some food and people could share, but today there are too many people. In those days, there was a famine and then it ended, but now there seems to be no end in sight. "This one is very severe and you can see a person literally dying from hunger. I have witnessed that in this village. When someone has stayed for maybe a week without eating, they become very weak and their skin begins to change, it wrinkles and dries. Some of them swell. "During this first stage, if the person finds food, they can survive. But when he passes that stage he becomes too weak, so that even if you bring food and he eats, there is no point in coming back to life. They are fully conscious, aware about their situation, and some will actually tell you 'I am not going to live, I am going to die.'" He can recall eight deaths among the older villagers from hunger this year, but many more children, so many that he has lost count. In one corner, sitting in the feeble shade offered by an overhanging roof, sits a little girl, Marietta, whom the couple have taken in. Both her grandparents starved to death this year, along with her mother. "In 1949, the main cause of the famine was drought. The rain came very late in the year. But there were people who had food from the previous harvest so it was this food which saved the people, because they could share, and the next planting they had good rains. "I grew up in this village, I have never gone from it. Each year I would harvest seven ox carts. I had ox carts and oxen but I sold them to buy food, so now I am back to where I started." Phikani says that he began to noitice changes in the weather and climate and a growing hunger in the 1980s. "At the beginning of the 1990s it became serious, only to reach the climax with very severe hunger last year, but it has been a slow process. "It is terrible. I have sold most of my property now, the goats, the oxen, I have no food and I am wondering what is it that God wants to do. I have lost hope because I try hard but what I get is a little, not enough to sustain myself and the family. I keep looking to God. We had much we have lost and we believe, we think, that we are going to die." He pauses, looks down: "We are finished, he says. People really know we are finished. We are greatly humbled. Everyone knows in this village that we are finished."
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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