Dateline ACT

Swaziland 01/04

No shortage of challenges in this drought

by Stephen Padre, ACT International

Swaziland, March 16, 2004--On the surface, the cause and effect of the widespread drought in southern Africa looks like a simple equation - without enough rain, farmers cannot grow food, and without enough food, people suffer from malnutrition and hunger. This alone is enough to threaten lives when the situation becomes severe enough.

Yet added to this equation are a host of other causes or effects (or both) that are having an impact on individuals and families. Among them are poverty, unemployment and HIV/AIDS, problems in their own right and sometimes enough to be life-threatening themselves. When added to a drought situation, people become trapped in a cycle in which food issues affect the economic and health situations of a family and vice versa.

Christinah Mbhamali, who lives in the rural Mndobandoba area, is caught in this complex cycle. Last year, at age 53, she was diagnosed as HIV-positive. After seeing her husband very ill for a few years, she wanted to know why she was falling ill too. Mbhamali says that her husband, Robert Ngcamphalala, died in 2000 in a way she couldn't understand. Staff of Lutheran Development Service (LDS), a member of the global alliance Action by Churches Together (ACT) International that is responding to the drought and its effects in Swaziland, who had visited Mbhamali, encouraged her to take an AIDS test. "I was prepared for anything," she recalls.

Taken by itself, the HIV diagnosis of a household's breadwinner would be enough to jeopardize the well-being of a family. But now, the added uncertainty of food sources is keeping Mbhamali in a delicate balance of threats from all sides.

LDS is now assisting her and some of the 40,000 others like her who are afflicted by drought and the parallel impact of HIV/AIDS in the south east lowlands of Swaziland. The area is 60 km from the nearest hospital that offers testing. Counseling for HIV patients is rarely available there. So LDS brings its services to the people.

Kenneth Matsebula is one of three trained LDS counselors who are HIV-positive themselves. He visits Mbhamali regularly at her home as part of LDS's plan to support people with HIV during the drought. Matsebula offers ways for Mbhamali to cope with her illness, especially related to her nutritional needs.

LDS staff say that poor and inadequate diets increase the likelihood of HIV-positive people in the area catching other infections, and as a result of this, death rates are on the rise.

"It's hard for people with HIV to eat well," Matsebula explains, especially when there are few types of food to choose from or when food is in short supply.

ACT members and partners had been distributing World Food Program (WFP) food rations to the most seriously affected communities early in the drought in July 2002. When the drought situation did not improve last year, ACT members around the world supported the current appeal, in which LDS, besides addressing the needs of HIV-infected people directly, is assisting those parts of the population that the WFP distributions cannot cover. For the long-term, LDS's plan is encouraging small farmers to grow drought-tolerant plants and to use different growing techniques.

Mbhamali receives some WFP rations, and LDS provides a basket of added nutritional food items for her each month. Matsebula also offers advice on traditional herbs that she can use with her food to maintain her health and brings medicines for her to take.

The medicine has helped her feel better physically, and because of the assistance she is receiving, Mbhamali says she is feeling emotionally and psychologically better too. "I feel strong, though not very strong," she says.

Before she was diagnosed as HIV-positive, Mbhamali worked as a cook at a nearby school. She isn't able to work anymore because of her illness, but she hopes to return to work one day. Two of her four children are still in school, and one of her daughters is especially helpful in caring for her, she says.

The list of worries for Mbhamali is long. Added to her daily concern of proper nutrition in her diet, being told to eat certain foods which she can't always get, she also worries about how she will pay for fees to keep her children in school. And while the drought wreaks its havoc, the planting area on the other side of her small fenced-in yard is bare-with no maize growing, there's no income.

"'Don't think too much,' I'm told," says Mbhamali. But she is always worrying, she says. At the edge of the empty garden area, within view of her bedroom, is her husband's grave.

With limited resources, there are only so many tangible items such as food and medicine an agency like LDS can provide to people trapped in a downward spiral like this. The regular visits by counselor Matsebula show that LDS perhaps more importantly offers companionship and is there to accompany people like Mbhamali in their struggles. Matsebula says, "We offer counseling and hope."

It may not seem like much, but for Mbhamali, whose future is bleak, there is hope in the present.

This Dateline is part of a series on the drought in southern Africa.

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