I’m eating lunch, crying, and angry.
According to a very well-written article featured on the front page the New York Times’ website today, inflation in Zimbabwe is currently 8,000,000,000,000,000,000%.
President Mugabe has declared the cholera epidemic to have ended, while thousands more are infected every hour and the number dying increases by the day. One family lost five children in two days. And the story of this girl’s tragic end brought even more tears to my eyes:
The death toll mounts each day. Chipo and Tecla Murape rushed their orphaned 5-year old niece, Moisha, to the clinic in Chitungwiza, a city just south of Harare, last week. Nurses told the family the veins in the girl’s arms had collapsed because she had lost so much fluid. No doctor ever saw her, her relatives said, and the nurses never hit a vein. Moisha, a shy, but friendly girl, instead drank rehydration fluids.
Throughout the day, she complained of a terrible thirst and a painful stomach ache. On the advice of clinic workers, her aunts did not even hold her hand as she lay dying, fearing infection. After night fell, the nurses said there was nothing more they could do and suggested Moisha’s relatives take her to the city’s hospital, some two and a half miles away.
But there was no ambulance. Tecla Murape, 42, swaddled Moisha to her back and set off hurriedly for the hour-long walk, her heart pounding with worry. Under a dark, moonless sky, she took a shortcut through a maize field, leaping across yet another putrid sewage spill. By the time they arrived, Mrs. Murape’s clothes were soaked with Moisha’s watery diarrhea. Hours later, Moisha passed away.
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