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| Children by the thousands live each day in Zambia with little to eat and even less to hope for, while shattered families grapple with overwhelming odds. |
As morning dawns in the rambling squatter community of Kanyama, sunlight warms the thickening haze of early-morning pollution and lung-burning dust already filling the air. By mid-morning, heat rises in visible waves from the tattered tin roofs covering the tiny, weatherworn brick houses crowding the densely-populated community.
Children, hungry and lacking classrooms to fill, gather in barren common areas to play and seek shelter from the stifling heat under anything that casts a shadow.
This is where 150,000 of Zambia’s poorest residents live, people for whom the collapsed copper market, a soaring unemployment rate and worsening AIDS crisis have been particularly devastating.
Most families here live in small, crumbling brick homes that are no more than eight or 10 feet across and a few feet in the other direction. Some have concrete floors; sadly, others have dirt. What they share are yawning gaps in the roofs and walls that choking dust and heavy rains easily breach. Absent from most homes are any furnishings or personal belongings, with the exception of a blanket or two for sleeping.
Also markedly absent are parents. While UNICEF reports that 16 percent of the population of Zambia is infected with HIV/AIDS, the number seems ambiguous when it’s nearly impossible to find a family untouched by the disease in Kanyama.
Thousands of children have been orphaned, many left to fend for themselves. And grandparents, after suffering the loss of their own children to the disease, are left with the seemingly insurmountable task of raising handfuls of grandchildren on incomes that amount to pennies a day.
Surviving…but just barely
Street vending is about the only means of survival for many. Unskilled, uneducated and overburdened, they muster the energy to sell everything from vegetables and cooking oil to fire-roasted peanuts, french fries and chicken intestines. If they’re industrious – and blessed with a good deal of luck – they can afford to feed their grandchildren at least one meal a day, which typically consists of nshima, a local dish made of corn, water and cooking oil.
Others, less fortunate and often too old or feeble to make the daily trek to buy supplies from markets miles away, can only afford to feed their grandchildren a few meals each week, further compromising their immune systems and making them more susceptible to rampant diseases. This is especially true during the rains when malaria, tuberculosis and cholera outbreaks spread like flash fire in the confined, destabilized community.
Those stricken by illness or injury have but one choice: a lone government clinic striving to provide medical attention to throngs of desperate people every day. But as the long lines snake into the dirt parking lot, many people simply tire of the hours-long wait and seek the assistance of local healers who are steeped in folkloric remedies that rarely provide relief.
Among despair, a flicker of hope
Esther Mwanachidalo, 61, is a widow who has lived the tragedies of Kanyama. Of her 11 adult children, nine have died. And now she cares for six grandchildren; however, she doesn’t have the strength to offer them much. Most days, she says in a voice scarred by loss, she roasts nuts over an open fire to sell for 20 cents a bag. It yields a return, however small, that makes it possible to prepare a few meals each week.
Tears fill her eyes and pour across her round cheeks when she speaks of the home she shares with her grandchildren. “The roof,” she explains to the translator, “is falling in. The children need a good place to stay. I have nothing to give them and it hurts….” Her words trail off as she recalls her own children, and more tears come. “I wonder why all this misery is happening.”
After a brief moment to collect herself and a concerned hug from two of her grandchildren, Esther brushes the tears from her swollen eyes and offers a quiet thank-you for the help Children International is bringing to her family through a new community center. It is, Esther hopes, the first step in a journey that will eventually lead her grandchildren far from the bleak life surrounding them in Kanyama.
Grandmothers just like Esther live all over the community. For them, any assistance can alter the course of a day, a week or even a month. Health care, good clothes instead of threadbare rags, a pair of shoes instead of bare feet, someone to turn to: these offer the promise of something better.
Reporting assisted by Children International's Zambia project staff.
Photo by Greg Tobey |
