Suffering in Zimbabwe like "Auchwitz"

The extent of the Families in a once agriculturally rich land are living – and dying – on a diet of nuts and berries as food shortages threaten up to five million Zimbabweans.

Father Peter stopped his truck beside a cluster of thatched mud huts deep in the arid, baking bushland of western Zimbabwe. A stick-thin woman, barefoot and dressed in rags, approached with her two young children.

“Please. We’re desperate for food,” she told him, and lifted up her children’s filthy T-shirts. Their stomachs and belly buttons were grotesquely distended by kwashiorkor, a condition caused by severe malnutrition that just a few years ago was unheard of in this once bountiful country.

The woman said she and her family were living off nuts and berries, for which they spent hours foraging in the bush each day. She showed us where her husband had buried their eldest daughter, who had died two months ago aged 12 after eating berries that caused severe stomach pains and made her vomit. “This is madness – madness,” Father Peter, visibly upset, said.

The priest promised the family food and medical help from his church-run clinic 12 miles away, then asked them to join him in prayer. “Lord, help us during these terrible times of hunger,” he said. “Give us hope and courage. Heal these children. Bring food to our fields and homes. Show us your love!”

There is nothing exceptional about this family. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of families in this region are surviving on wild berries or nuts that they grind into powder and mix with water, a weed called lude that they boil into a thin soup. They also eat insects such as locusts, if they can find them. Some even eat the moist inner fibres of bark.

Far away in Harare the Mugabe regime, and even Western nongovernment organisations, deny that Zimbabweans are actually dying of hunger, but here, more than 100 miles from any main population centre, they are starving to death.

Father Peter, a local opposition councillor, and the clinic’s chief doctor told The Times that three adults and five children had died of starvation in the past three months. Others had probably died unrecorded, while hundreds more avoided death by starvation only because they succumbed to fatal illness first.

“People are starving here. The extent of the suffering has reached Auschwitz proportions,” Father Peter declared. The doctor, an expatriate, added: “It’s a silent tsunami. They die so quietly. They don’t demonstrate or cry out or stand up. They just die.”

The one mercy is that Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic has yet to reach this area, but Father Peter is terrified that it will. So weak are the people that cholera would sweep away hundreds, he said. “It would be an absolute catastrophe.”

But the death, the suffering and the constant struggle to stay open exacts a heavy toll of those who work there.

The chief doctor had visibly aged over the past year, and looked exhausted. So did Father Peter.

“It’s very, very hard. It breaks me down. I’ve seen too much suffering,” he said. “We were never trained for this sort of priesthood. This is the priesthood of the concentration camps.”