Malili, Malawi — Skeletal children dying of starvation and the carcasses of livestock aren't yet found in the bone dry villages of Malawi's interior, but the dots connecting weather, disease and poverty to "food emergency" link every village in the desiccated Malawian countryside.
In Malili village just outside of the town of Likuni, a father explaining why his children are not in school says they are at a local mill collecting maize husks because that is a source of food.
Babies that are too thin, nursing at the breasts of women who seem too tired even while sitting, is a common sight in villages like this.
Some 870 pupils from 28 villages are served by ten primary schools in this district - Likuni Zone, Lilongwe Rural West - but just 500 are in attendance, according to Rogers Newa who directs the Center for Children and Youth Affairs(CYCA) here in Malili.
"It is very difficult when the child has gone without food to come to school. He doesn't have the energy," says Newa.
"A hungry child cannot attend classes properly. Even if he forces himself to be in the class, he cannot grasp whatever the teacher is trying to say. Even if it is a qualified and trained teacher, that child will not get anything because he is hungry," he says.
HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, cholera and other killer diseases further erode life, adds the village chief, Godfrey Chisamba. "When one member of the family is sick, it means the children don't come to school," says Chisamba. "They are busy taking care of whoever in the family is sick."
The number of orphans "is still increasing," says another villager, Fred Nkungo, who heads the village health committee. "They are being looked after by elderly people; and sometimes by fellow children."
Older villagers face a greater and greater burden. Within the village, says Chisamba, "there are two dead bodies here now - young ones. For the old ones who are left, when it comes to daily food, they struggle looking in some of these trading centers for a grinding mill where there are [corn] husks right on the ground. They collect them right from the ground and process it as food. They are taking care of the grandchildren."
The general poverty is evident everywhere in these communities. Income averages a dollar a day. Much needing to be done remains undone for long periods of time. Here in Malili, a new classroom building built over a year ago with local bricks still has no roof. Students bake beneath hot sun, or, on rare occasions when there is some rain, they get soaked.
"We are talking of Aids. We are talking of poverty. We are talking of hunger," says Chief Chisamba in a powerfully succinct summary of the situation. Cholera, for example, generally exacerbated by poor sanitation, normally affects about 0.2% of Malawi's adult population. But in 2002, this rose to 1%. More than half of rural inhabitants get their drinking water from unsafe sources, according to a recent Unicef study.
Government resources are slim. Foreign intervention can be crucial. The Center is a partner organization of CARE International. "We're very concerned about the drought in Malawi and the food crisis combined with HIV/Aids," says CARE president Peter Bell, during a visit to Malawi last month "to see first hand" the extent of Malawi's food crisis. AllAfrica accompanied him on the trip.
Approximately three million of Malawi's 11 million people may be at risk of "severe malnutrition over coming months," Bell says. But these numbers are fuzzy, he acknowledges. The number of those at risk may be much higher. In many villages, aid falls short of need.
CARE cites a number of "interconnected" reasons for Malawi's food crisis, part of a larger disaster affecting some 14 million people in Southern Africa. These include the increasing cost of fertilizer, a lack of quality seed, adverse and uncertain climatic conditions, e.g. prolonged rains and flooding, along with drought, and a decline in areas that are planted with food crops.
At one food station where CARE workers were distributing food, some villagers who showed up complained that they had not been declared sufficiently needy for food. CARE identifies need in conjunction with local committees using specific criteria. "For instance, we know that women who head households are particularly vulnerable, says Bell. "Households that have large numbers of orphans are also particularly vulnerable. But we have a limit at this stage of 15 percent of a given population and that's inadequate."
This confronts villages with an ugly choice: share the limited amount of food aid as best as they can with everyone getting an inadequate little, or give food to the most hungry, leaving others -- old and young --- hungry but not suffering from hunger enough to be on the official list of need.
Why the limit? "That's the food that's available at this point," says Bell, and it can only meet the needs of about 15 percent of any population. "Assistance is programmed to increase, [but] our concern is that even that may not be enough."
"There is a tradition of sharing within the community. When I was first exposed to this I was shocked by it, quite frankly. By western standards this was a diversion of the purpose for which the food was given. But all of the people in these villages are poor. There's just more or less poverty. But there is also a tradition of cohesiveness, and that's an important tradition to maintain. The communities with which we work have their own safety nets, and I suspect it would be unwise to second guess those traditions in many instances."
Peter Bell's observation hints at another more hopeful side of Malawi's food crisis reflecting possibility more than emergency. The starting points are small, almost invisible.
In the village of Chipanga near the Mozambique border, a crowd of singing women turns out to be members of a recently organized savings association. Lack of money is as much, and perhaps more, of a problem in Malawi's rural areas as lack of rain. CARE organizers have been encouraging the formation of groups like this. Since July, the association has managed to save some 47,000 Malawian kwatcha - a little over US$600, a lot of money in a village this poor.
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They buy household items, school uniforms for their children, food, and fertilizer. They even loan money to non-members of the group. "I'm very happy about this," says one woman. "None of my crops were fertilized," she says -- a reminder that in Malawi and much of Africa women do the farming -- "because I didn't have the money."
But what happens if someone doesn't pay back a loan? "Well." says another woman, "if the loan payment is due and one of the members is nowhere to be seen, we ask for the interest. But if she doesn't even pay back the interest we call her, sit down and try to discuss, to work out something - a 'grace period'." The group also applies an additional "loan default interest charge." That usually gets repayment started. Social pressure is powerful in these tiny places.
It's a start. "Things can look bad." says CARE senior vice president for programs, Patrick Carey. "But it's wrong to think that real progress isn't being made."
