Zimbabwe dispatches: looking for a rubbish tip
Updated on 24 February 2009
As the UN secretary general calls for emergency food aid for Zimbabwe, Helen illustrates how his assessment is an understatement.
I drew back in fright from the man that lurched out of the overgrown, jungly bush on the roadside.
I was looking for the town tip and was driving at a snail's pace along the sandy road which runs behind the main High School in the area. The road has been badly washed away and huge gullies creep out into the road threatening to swallow up car wheels which stray anywhere near.
The grass and weeds are taller than a man and hang dripping and waving into the road, brushing the windscreen and roof of the car.
The man at my window was filthy, his hair woolly and matted and his clothes torn and ragged. Fear was replaced with empathy as I greeted him and the man responded by cupping his hands together and clapping in the traditional Zimbabwean greeting.
His fingernails were lined with black grime, his mouth filled with brown, rotten teeth. He obviously lived somewhere here, in the bush nearby.
Eight or ten lines of small maize plants were growing in a little cleared patch and a stinking stream of sewage ran through the middle. 
Sewage flows through maize plants.
I choked back the retch caused by the foul smell and could not imagine how the man could survive this hell or how there was not cholera or some other deadly disease running openly across the paths here.
Just that day I had read that UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon had said that 7m people needed emergency food aid in Zimbabwe. This is well over half the population of the country.
Mr Ban also said that the humanitarian situation in the country had reached "an almost unbearable point for the people in Zimbabwe". The words are an understatement in the context of this vision of horror taking place in a Zimbabwean town today.
Mr Ban's words also stand in stark contrast to the news just coming in about our Vice President, Mrs Mujuru and attempts to sell 3.5 tons of Congolese gold. The revenue from this is un-imaginable in a country where most people are unable to even feed themselves. 
Rubbish on the road in Zimbabwe.
All the way down the eroded road, garbage has been dumped into the grass by residents of the town.
It has been ten months since there has been a garbage collection in the town and people are desperate to get rid of their waste.
Just a few metres away from the wall and in clear view of the High School, tins, bottles, bags and other garbage has been dumped under a tree. Big green bottle flies and a score of mosquitoes rise up from the filth as they are disturbed by my progress.
I never did find the tip but the vision of a starving, filthy man emerging from the bush and seeing sewerage run through his maize plants is vivid in my mind's eye.
Rubbish by a school in Zimbabwe.
