Zimbabwe blog: living like animals
Updated on 29 October 2008
Zimbabwe blogger Helen speaks to one man about the new diets in rural areas.
"People are living like animals," a man from a rural area said when I met him this week.
When I asked Joseph to explain what he meant, his description was of a primitive, desperate existence where people are digging up roots, collecting leaves and boiling beetles just to stay alive.
"Everyone's hungry," he said. "The word you hear all the time is NZARA, it means hunger, and it's everywhere."
All of last year's stored maize crop has now completely run out and Joseph said that despite the government's lifting of the ban on food aid, nothing has arrived in his village yet.
He said that three weeks ago some NGOs had come to the village and taken the names, family details and numbers of people in each village but so far they hadn't come back with food.
"Everything that we had to sell has been sold," Joseph said. "There's nothing left to trade with."
Goats, chickens, items of furniture, spare clothes, and radios - all sold in order to buy food.
Goats, chickens, items of furniture, spare clothes, and radios - all sold in order to buy food.
"People are digging for roots," Joseph said, "from plants that our grandparents used to talk about, things we've never had to eat in all our lifetime."
Joseph described the back breaking toil of digging in the baked ground for dry, hard roots with thick skins. He said that lots of people were getting sick with stomach cramps and diarrhoea from eating roots that hadn't been cooked for long enough or which came from unknown trees and shrubs.
"Some are eating leaves that they boil and then mash up, if they can't find any wild fruits. We were surviving on Muhacha berries," he said, "raw, cooked, dried and used as sort of porridge." The season for these fruits is almost over and even they weren't all good because many people got diarrhoea from eating too many of them.
"Now its Mandere that we are searching for," Joseph said and described the frenzied swatting, jumping and running of villagers that could be witnessed every evening after sunset.
Mandere are coffee coloured brown beetles, about an inch long, that only come out at night and make a distinct screeching/swizzing noise - like the ringing in your ears.
The beetles feed on the leaves of Msasa trees after sunset and are caught in flight. For many starving villagers these beetles are the only protein they can get but they require prolonged boiling before they are safe to eat.
Joseph's other five acres will remain barren this coming season as there's still no seed maize to be found, not for love nor money.
The heads and wings are removed before cooking and some of the older villagers insist that the water must be changed and the beetles boiled twice to get rid of a poison.
Joseph looked tired and dragged a hand over his gaunt face, telling me he wasn't getting much sleep lately, worrying about how to keep his family alive and trying not to think about his own hunger.
Joseph has seven acres of land and is exhausted from the labour of trying to get some maize seed planted in time for the coming rains. It's not proper maize seed, just good looking pips that he saved from last year's crop.
His wife wanted to eat it because the family are already hungry but Joseph insisted it be kept for seed. He thinks he's got enough for about two acres and he's tilling the rock hard soil by hand as there are no government tractors to hire for ploughing and his oxen that used to pull the plough have been sold for food.
Joseph's other five acres will remain barren this coming season as there's still no seed maize to be found, not for love nor money.
