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October 4, 2002, Friday MICE ARE ALL THAT'S LEFT TO EAT IN THIS VILLAGE, AND THEY ARE GETTING SCARCE Gethin Chamberlain In Lilongwe, Malawi FIVE of Levison Samalani's children are going to die. Folosi will be the first. And soon, maybe this week. Already she is hopelessly weak, her eyes unfocussed, sitting in the dirt pawing at the flies that torment her constantly. Three years old, and Folosi has had her last birthday. Emily, eight, will be next. Her fragility masked by her tattered dress and bright eyes, but betrayed by her discoloured hair, as sure a sign of malnutrition as any. Look closely. Emily, too, is swollen with worms, her feet scabbed. Regina, nine months old, Lifo, three and Chipiriro, eight, are little better. None of them has eaten for a month. Unless there is a miracle, they will not make it beyond February. In Malawi, there is another word for hunger - February. They speak the word nervously, according it the respect that a word synonymous with death can command, as if even the mention of its name will conjure up what they fear most. It is the month when all the grain from the last harvest will be gone. When they talk of February, they mean starvation, a slow death, the will to live sapped by months without food, the old and the young fading away, their families powerless to help. In the first stages, there is desperation, a pitiful search for food which could still save them. But there is a point of no return, when they know that hope has gone and even the desire for food evaporates. Last year thousands died, and this year it will be worse. They talk of a famine of biblical proportions, but numbers have little meaning for those caught up in this catastrophe. Fifty is the number of kilogrammes of grain a family needs to eat for a month. Eight is the number of grandchildren Phikani Balayi, the oldest man in the village, has seen die in the last ten years as the harvests began to fail and the subsidies for fertiliser and grain seed were stopped. One is the number of weeks that Folosi Samalani is expected to live unless she eats something today. She has reached the stage where even food will not save her. She can still flick at the flies settling on her, but that won't last. Within days she will be silent, her legs scarred with sores, her stomach bloated , her hair turning paler through copper deficiency. Then she will die. Levison Samalani, her father, caught a mouse today, but there are nine other children and two wives to feed apart from himself, so he must share the mouse. It is not a big mouse, maybe 2in or 3in long. People used to light fires to drive the vermin into their mouseholes and then dig them out. They would boil the mice with a little salt, dry them in the sun and slice them thinly, nibbling on the dried meat. But even the mice are scarce now, their numbers dwindling as the food reserves run out. There are no more mouse-hunts; those they catch have been found in the open. Levison has ten children by two wives, and three grandchildren. They live in central Malawi in Kanyopola village, a collection of grass-roofed mud huts which is home to 240 people, a couple of hours drive along rutted dirt tracks from the capital Lilongwe. No-one in the village has eaten anything today and it is weeks since they have eaten their staple food of sima, a porridge made from maize flour. They scavenge for wild fruit, shoots, tubers and work in the fields in return for maize husks. Sometimes they travel to Zambia, 30 or 40km away, to find some work to get money to buy a little grain. The children hang around the village outskirts, scavenging for crickets and grasshoppers and mice. They are not growing. They are stunted and losing the ability to walk. Levison knows it is only a matter of time before his children start to die and that Folosi will be first. "When she was taken to the under-five clinic, the health people told me that she was severely undernourished. I can see the signs. If it goes on like this, she may not survive. She is on supplementary feeding extra, fortified, grain provided by the hospital to sustain those children at greatest risk , but it is not enough. It comes once a month but it has to be shared with the other children, so the problem goes on," he says. "I am not sure how long she can last. If it goes on like this, the chances of survival are not there." In his rolled up trousers and red-and-white striped top, Levison is sitting in the dirt outside his home, clutching his precious mouse. "I caught the mouse for food. I dig out the hole where it hides with a hoe. You see the tail and grab it, then pull it out and kill it. Sometimes it runs away and you run after it and jump on it," he says. "Normally we go to hunt mice every day but now they are scarce, we don't bother. If we chance upon a mouse, we pounce on it and kill it. The last time we ate a normal meal was at the beginning of the month. Since then, nothing. It is impossible to eat the mouse alone, so I share it with my family." He used to grow maize, ground nuts, beans and tobacco, selling some to bring in extra money, but as the situation deteriorated, he was forced to sell everything to buy food. "It has been a terrible year. I will never forget it because besides having no food I have sold some of my valuable property, two bicycles, a radio, some goats and some chickens. They are all gone now. I sold them to save my children's lives," he says. Some goats graze in the village, but they have come from another settlement nearby to eat what grass there is. In March, when the famine was last at its height, many people admitted into the hospitals were suffering from terrible injuries inflicted by machetes and beatings. At least 80 people were killed, attacked by the owners of animals they stole out of desperation. The punishment for stealing someone else's animals is brutal. "The situation is bad ," says Levison. "My hope lies in my garden where I work every day, but if I don't get fertiliser and seed, however hard I work, I will not get anything next year because the soil is so infertile. If that happens, we will all die. "It is a helpless situation. If no remedy comes in time, it will be chaotic, it will be worse than it was this year. I feel so sorry when I look at my children. "For Folosi, there is no hope for next year, there is no hope that she will go through to next year. That is why my hands are dead, from working very hard in the garden. I am working very hard to save my family. "My youngest child is six months old and he is in the same situation, he is very sick. Five of my children are like this, they are critical." He stares at the ground: "I could lose them all," he says softly. Nearby, outside the hut they built themselves, Joseph and Catherine James sit cradling their only daughter, Madaloo. They met in school, he in the seventh grade, she a year above him. There was never any question that they would not get married: "I thought she was beautiful," 24-year-old Joseph recalls. They wed four years ago and within a year Catherine, now 22, was pregnant. Chikondi, their first daughter, was born in January 2000, Madaloo, their second child, followed in July the next year, but already the signs of the coming famine were beginning to show. The family's crops failed, there was nothing to eat. By March, Chikondi's condition was becoming critical, so they took her to the hospital, but all the doctors could tell them was that she needed food. They returned home and searched the fields, but three days after she left the hospital, Chikondi died. "I felt a lot of pain. After that, when we had a little food, I couldn't eat," says Catherine. Now they can see the same signs in Madaloo, and they are afraid. Every day, they rise at 5am and go to the little plot of land they call their garden to work on the land, trying to prepare it for planting. While Madaloo sits in the shade of a tree, they work for hours rather than return home. "Serious hunger is coming so we are trying to work in the garden," says Catherine. "We have tilled the ground but we do not have enough seed to grow. That is where our hope is, but it is a long time to wait for the harvest." She looks across at Joseph, sitting disconsolately against the wall of their home: "His strongest desire is to restore the beauty in me," she says, smiling for the first time. Donations to World Vision, which works with the affected communities in Malawi and other southern African countries, can be made by calling 0800 50 10 10 .
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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