It’s Too Dry in Muusha Even for the Waste of Tears : Africa: Years of drought breed malnutrition and disease. But leaving the land is out of the question.

In July, in Muusha, a hamlet arranged on a plateau in of southeastern Zimbabwe, I met the other side of fear. I was there to visit a health-delivery project funded by Save the Children, the board of which I recently joined, but all normal questions were irrelevant. Muusha had gone dry.

Gerry Salole, the Ethiopian director of Save the Children’s southern African operation, stopped our Toyota halfway up a rocky incline so that we could talk to a woman he recognized. She was short, wore no shoes, had wrapped her head in a colorful torn scarf, and was on her way to a funeral.

A businessman, she explained in soft English, the one who ran the shop that had run out of food a week ago, had drunk a cup of bad water the day before, too thirsty to boil it first. Naturally, the diarrhea was bad--that was to be expected--but to die so quickly? This was not a good sign. It seemed almost too coincidental, too similar to what had happened to two children the week before. She was worried, she admitted, and asked if we would like to observe a case of pellagra brought on by malnutrition. The sick woman was in the house just down the lane. She wouldn’t mind our intrusion. Perhaps then we would talk to whoever it was that might be asked to send a little cornmeal.

Muusha is in the midst of its seventh and most severe winter of drought, and the effect is brutal, dusty, too dry even for the waste of tears. If climatological forecasts hold true, it won’t rain again until November and the first crop of maize won’t be ready before May at the earliest.

The drought has dealt a blow to Zimbabwe, normally an exporter of grain and possessing one of the most stable and varied economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Without massive, pro-active philanthropic assistance, the country is likely to experience a crippling setback. The first priority is to deepen existing wells in rural areas--a job that, on average, costs about $600 each.

Around Muusha, the weather barred any harvest whatsoever this season; only five rapidly depreciating wells remain to meet the water needs of nearly 12,000 people; economics eliminated the grade school children’s lunch program, and as a result there are daily faintings and steep declines in attendance. The World Bank, anxious that the last vestiges of Zimbabwe’s former inclination toward socialism be abandoned, urged the imposition of a token tuition charge for all grade levels. Equivalent to one U.S. dollar per year, this fee constitutes a burden to the poorest families, who have responded by sending only boys to classes. Many of the girls, I was told, resorted to prostitution in order to eat.

Yet in some respects Muusha is a model Shona community, the beneficiary of past foreign philanthropic attention and subsidy. There is the clinic, the woman explained, and there, those abandoned buildings? That had once been a large farm before the cattle starved. And look at the view. Foreign aid inspectors always remark about the way the land stretches west toward the mountains. Didn’t I want to take a photograph so that I could show my family back home the beauty of this country?

I didn’t have a camera, but I did have a question. What will eventually happen, I asked the woman, who clearly had other things to do than talk to me. Will people leave, move to cities, join others in temporary shelters? I was thinking of the five camps Zimbabwe has established for the 300,000 Mozambicans who have fled the atrocities of a civil war inspired by East/West political competition that’s now obsolete; only the misery endures.

Oh no, she replied. We would never leave our land.

But what if the last wells go dry and no more money is donated to dig them deeper? What if, as predicted, there will soon be no water?

Then we will die, she said evenly, her eyes averted up the hill to the sad obligation for which we had already made her late.

She turned back to me, too polite a hostess to terminate our conversation without some sign on my part.

Thank you for your time, I said.

Good; she took her leave by the appropriate local custom, bowing slightly from the waist, wishing me health and gently clapping her hands together in the imitation of applause.

She was not a bit afraid, that genteel woman of Muusha, and it wasn’t because of false optimism or of a failure to realize the gravity of her situation. She had no fear because it had been, like the food, like the water, like even the seeds once guarded for spring, already long used up.

Next: The flight from war to drought.