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as far reaching as the death of a paramount chief.
Driving down the dusty but usable road slowly to cushion my SUV wearing shock absorbers, I felt the heat and its presence hit the core of my heart tellingly. Even the surrounding vegetation, bereft of anything green at the dawn of the rainy season, was in unison with nature.
The imposing power pylons on their unbroken if arranged journey from the Kariba Power Station in the catacombs of the mighty Zambezi River, some 160km away, was the only feature that told an endless story of agreement with nature.
The rest of us were in mutual complaint to the Creator with trees having given up all their leaves, shed to bareness, making the loudest sound of appeal.
The few goats that roamed the Hurungwe locality, prowling the rejuvenating climbers in the small thickets, momentarily stopped grafting for a meal to give attention to the automobile as I continued with my calculated drive.
That the area was hit by the scarcity of rains the previous fall was not in doubt, more so that time of the year.
But, that also the area had a modicum of growth was not could not be missed either as surrounding schools and clinics had electricity, thanks to the Government rural electrification programme.
It was like an expert who sees a US$10 million sculpture and instantly spots it’s a fake. Yes, like a marriage analyst knowing within minutes whether the couple will stay together or not. Better still, as a firefighter suddenly senses he has to get out of a blazing building, the moment I saw those huge 4×4 Land Cruisers, tearing down the road in their rehearsed pomp, I knew instantly, though without knowing why, that something was happening in the area.
The vehicles with distinguished marks of international organisations just do not burn their fuel and clock kilometres in the area for the run of it. It had to be something important. And indeed it was something important.
Upon meeting and talking to the occupants of the cars, I learnt the subject was about the food relief programmes undertaken by UKaid’s Department for International Development (DfID) in the province. The purpose for the exercise was visiting the families who had been given food vouchers to redeem for basics to supplement their food requirements, whose tenure was coming to a close by the last day of August.
Their last research findings had established that some of the families, despite not having enough food to eat were keeping the vouchers oblivious of their use by date tag, which was coming to end within two weeks and therefore needed to be redeemed before then. So the organisation had to roll out a programme to rescue that and also assess the success of the same project in alleviating hunger in the targeted communities.
“We are not allowed to speak to the media about the details of our project but what we are doing is simply assessing the impact of the programme, mainly whether the voucher system is working to the desired effect — that is helping needy communities accessing food from selected stores to the value printed on the vouchers.
“So far our initial findings have been that some of the families had not redeemed their entire quota of vouchers and they ran the risk of expiring while they struggled for food, so we are encouraging them to use up their vouchers before August 31 2012 as printed on the face.
“Some have not used them because they could not find the products they wanted to buy, while others were trying to stretch them oblivious of the expiry dates.
“So this team of officials you are seeing will be visiting each of the families listed as beneficiaries to assess whether they have used their vouchers or better still they got some relief from the use thereof,” a senior member of the team who spoke on condition of anonymity told this journalist.
Further investigation revealed that indeed the area has been covered under the DFID scheme and that some families have benefited from that, yet others, while admitting relief, clearly showed they needed more than food as children do not go to school for lack, while they can not even muster enough money to buy seed for growing staple crops even if rains come in biblical Noah proportions. They needed more than that.
And indeed UKaid followed that up by sending another team to evaluate and assess how many of the beneficiaries would need education assistance and to what degree.
Some of the findings are startling as children as old as nine and 10 years have not gone to school and do not see the need as they worry more about survival than school.
Most of them are born of parents who barely completed primary school themselves and are as young as 21-26 years, but already with, on average three siblings.
One family was ominous. The mother, Mildred Makapu, was 19 years and already had a two-year-old son and five-month-old daughter, both barely kitted.
The father, Regis Makapu was 24 years. And the best educated in the family is the mother who endured five years of primary education at a local primary school — Birimahwe School, about five kilometres from the place they call home.
The father barely lasted three years of primary school. How can such a family be assisted? Do they need food, education, agricultural assistance or they are simply a special case? Crucially, they are not the only ones – there are several other such families.
What came out clearly for me was how much of importance would such information be, if it is shared with the Government and all other ecumenical organisations.
The area, which is vast, regularly suffers from lack of enough rains and is sparsely populated, although occasionally animals come in their droves to destroy some of the crops that could survive the drought.
Online Reporter