Digging the riverbed to find water

One of the worst droughts on record is sweeping southern Africa, leaving nearly 70 million people without adequate food and water.

A community and their livestock gather in a dry riverbed in the Muzi district of northern Zimbabwe. The Wambozi River usually flows year-round, but now there is only beige sand as far as the eye can see.

Men armed with shovels and buckets dug into the riverbed, desperately trying to draw out the last drops of water from the river.

Rivers and dams in other parts of the region have dried up, leading to more and more people flocking to this particular riverbed in Kurima village, putting pressure on the water source.

There are several holes along the riverbed that are large enough to fit a bucket.

Children were bathing, women were washing clothes and giving water to the bellowing cows.

Among them stood Gracis Phiri, a mother of five. The 43-year-old told the BBC she now had to walk further than usual, spending up to three hours a day fetching water.

Ms. Phiri lowered a bucket into the half-meter (19-inch) wide hole to scoop up the brown water. She feared her family would get sick.

“As you can see, the cattle are drinking water from the same pit as us. Their urine is right there… it’s not very healthy,” she said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Zimbabwe also has food shortages, with 7.7 million people facing hunger. In Muzi, the number of households with access to adequate quantities of cheap, nutritious food has more than halved compared with previous years, local health authorities said.

Children have been particularly affected – the number of children admitted to hospitals for moderate to severe malnutrition has doubled since June.

The village feeding program is working to address this problem. Once a week, women from the community come together, bring whatever produce they have, and serve porridge to children under five.

Grated baobab fruit, peanut butter, milk and Stir leafy greens into your porridge to add extra nutrition.

But the list of ingredients is shrinking every week – cowpeas and beans have recently become out of stock due to poor harvests.

With support from partners including UNICEF, the government designed a village feeding programme that runs at least three times a week.

“But due to the drought caused by El Nino, we are now only able to carry out vaccinations once a week,” explained Kudzai Madamombe, the Muzi district medical officer.

“Due to the lack of rain, we have suffered 100 percent loss in all our crops,” he added, saying the programme might be forced to stop completely next month due to dwindling food stocks.

Mr Madamambe said clinics providing vital health services to Zimbabweans in the Muzi area had also been affected – the borehole that supplies water to a quarter of the clinics in the area had gone dry.

The region’s main dam has only one month’s supply of water left.

As a result, vegetable irrigation schemes, including one to support 200 local farmers, have been suspended.

There is suffering everywhere, said Tambudzai Mahachi, 36, who grows acres of corn, cowpeas and peanuts on her land.

Despite her efforts, she had nothing to show for it, not even a plate of food. Even her tough baobab tree produced almost no fruit.

Ms Mahachi said in good years she would normally supply markets in the capital, Harare, but now she was one of millions of Zimbabweans relying on handouts.

Although the village feeding program only provides food one day a week, her children need to eat every day.

She sat in her thatched hut, cooking wheat provided by a kind neighbor for breakfast for her two children.

“We’ve gone from eating whatever we want, whenever we want, to eating in limited quantities,” Ms Mahachi said.

“My eldest daughter knows that sometimes we can only have porridge. But sometimes I can see that my youngest daughter is hungry.”

Much of southern Africa has not seen any rain this year, and the continent relies mainly on rainfall rather than irrigation for agricultural water.

The drought has caused about one-third of countries in southern Africa to declare a state of disaster, with 68 million people in the region in need of food aid.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) – a group of countries in the region – has called for $5.5bn (£4bn) in aid to deal with the impact of the drought. in May. So far, only a small portion has been received.

“If you go anywhere in southern Africa you will find household granaries are empty and maize – the most consumed carbohydrate in the region – is now unaffordable due to high prices,” Thomson Phiri, a spokesman for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in southern Africa, told the BBC.

“It’s only going to get worse.”

He said the World Food Programme had received only one-fifth of the $400 million in emergency aid it needed, adding that southern Africa was experiencing its biggest maize deficit in 15 years.

And the hunger and water crises have yet to peak – October, the hottest and driest month of the year, is still a long way off.

If it rains in November or December, when the rainy season usually begins, farmers will have to wait until March to harvest corn.

Ms. Mahachi was acutely aware of this as she peeled some wild fruits to ease her hunger, unsure of what her small family would face in the coming months.