By Kudzai Makombe
Sitting in her smoky but well-kept kitchen hut breast-feeding her two- month-old baby, Amai Judy (Judy’s mother), surprisingly appears very composed despite the fact that there are over 30 children eating in and around her hut.
The children are all under five, but despite appearances – her loving watchful eye and their attentiveness to her – they are not all hers. They belong to the community of Taru village and come here to eat under the Supplementary Feeding Programme for Children designed to combat child malnutrition during the drought.
On this particular morning, a large group of thin but obviously happy children were sitting down and eating their meal hungrily – a porridge made out of a healthy mixture of maize meal, beans, groundnuts and cooking oil. Asked whether they liked the porridge and if it tasted good, they all responded “yes” enthusiastically.
Seemingly in her early thirties with six children of her own, Amai Judy takes her mothering job as well as that of village community worker (VCW) for Taru village very seriously. Under the programme funded by UNICEF, she was elected by her community to collect, keep and prepare food for children under five years of age within the community. She takes it in her stride, as though the additional children are just an extension of her own.
At l0am each morning, the mothers in the village bring their children to Amai Judy’s kitchen and help her prepare the food. The women are keen to continue with the programme even when the drought is over.
“I think the programme and the food is very good because there is a distinct change in the health of the children. They really like the porridge and usually, they start troubling their mothers to bring them here long before feeding time,” Amai Judy said laughingly.
Taru village in Chivi district, a part of the Masvingo province, south of the country is one of the worst drought hit areas in the country. The community is very poor. There have been little or no rains in this part of the country for the past seven years and almost all the cattle – the people’s traditional source of wealth – have died.
The village primary school is in shambles. Most classrooms have broken windows and the entire roof of one block blew off in a recent windstorm. There are no desks, only a few benches scattered around the classrooms. The books are not only few, but tattered and long out of date. Despite the bitter cold and wind, some of the grade seven pupils, hungry but still eager for knowledge, were spending their holiday taking extra lessons for the upcoming examinations.
The school’s headmaster, W.M. Chimhamhiwa, is faced with a virtually impossible task of attempting to run a school with limited educational resources. The remoteness of the village was mirrored in his excitement on spotting the previous day’s newspaper, long read and thoughtlessly discarded as old news, in the visitor’s car. Despite the hospitality, he had shown in taking them around the feeding points and showing how they worked, their meagre offer in return of that paper was met with profuse gratitude.
The most serious problem in Taru village is the shortage of water. The nearest water source is an unprotected natural spring which poses a health hazard and is inadequate for the entire community. The nearest protected water source is more than two kilometres away.
Lack of food naturally goes hand in hand with lack of water. According to Sally Fegan-Wyles, the UNICEF Field Representative for Zimbabwe, The feeding programme for children is of little use as a supplementary programme if they are not getting any other meals. The villagers complain that drought relief is coming irregularly, and in most cases is only being distributed to the aged.
Despite all this lack of facilities, water, food, the drought and with the livestock mostly dead, the people are not dejected. The community is doing its best to look after itself. What food and water there is, is shared and there is general concern and care as well as help coming from outsiders.
The Supplementary Feeding Programme seems to be working well. According to Mr Chikurira, the Provincial Administrator, an estimated 218 000 children in the Masvingo province have so far been reached by the Supplementary Feeding Programme. A great achievement in view of the fact that only about 250 000 children in the whole country were reached in 1984.
The Ministry of Health which through its district offices monitors the distribution of food and the nutritional status of the children is so far mainly faced with transport hitches.
In Chivi district alone, there are over 659 feeding points in comparison to 400 in 1984. Due to transport problems, the packs arc delivered to holding points rather than directly to the feeding centres. There are 72 holding points in the district, mainly schools and clinics. Taru primary school is one of these. From the holding points, the various feeding centres collect their required number of packs. The average distance from a holding point to surrounding feeding centres is about five kilometres.
Each food pack donated by UNICEF which includes 15kgs of maize meal, 4kgs groundnuts, 4kgs beans and cooking oil, feeds IO children for one month.
In order to keep account of how well the programme is progressing, each village community worker keeps daily records of how many children are fed, how much of the food is used and the names of the children as well as those absent. The children are supposed to be weighed occasionally, but due to the shortage of scales, this has not been possible.
Children over five are also suffering from hunger, but they are not being taken into consideration under the programme. During feeding time at Amai Judy’s home, some malnourished children – brothers and sisters of the under-fives can be seen standing at a discreet distance from the hut, watching the younger ones eat.
“During the last school term, about five pupils per day were complaining of headaches or stomach aches caused by hunger,” Mr Chimhamhiwa explained. “Most ended up fainting or going home, especially those in the first and second grades.”
Already, the school attendance is down. “It is difficult to deny those who are just over five years of age food especially when it is so readily accessible in our storeroom,” he said resignedly. He admits that he sometimes feeds pupils from the packs meant for the under-fives.
This is discouraged by the district health offices. But if over fives come to feeding points, the village community workers are advised not to turn them away, but simply to account for them in their record books.
One of the difficulties of monitoring the programme expressed by Amai Judy was the erratic numbers of children who attended the feeding programme on a daily basis. She explained that this was a result of the gold-panning activities of some families at the major rivers.
Families from the community periodically move to the river sides to earn what little they can from gold panning. There are no feeding programmes in these areas and living conditions arc squalid. “Shanty structures have developed along the major rivers “with no facilities whatsoever,” Wilbert Sadomba, UNICEF Water and Environment Officer pointed out. “It is frightening to think what would happen if disease were to break out within these communities.”
Mothers engaged in gold panning are encouraged by the district health officials to take their under-fives to nearby villages for supplementary feeding. However, these villages usually turn them away because they fear that their own supplies may run out.
Despite the seemingly bleak present in which they are living, the people of Taru village arc managing as best as they can. The Supplementary Feeding programme is certainly proving to be a great help in this remote and drought stricken area.
The efforts being made by the Masvingo province together with UNICEF and the affected communities to ensure the survival of children through the drought period is reflecting signs of success in the children of Taru village’s bright and alert eyes. (SARDC)
