GWENGWE, Malawi - To reach the house of Madyawako Lepu, you follow a worn dirt footpath through this mountain village, past barren crop rows, dilapidated mud huts and a banana tree stripped bare of its fruit.
In these times of hunger, it is difficult to tell if anyone is home. No goats graze in the yard. No cooking fires burn. No talking or laughter is heard. Lepu's family sits motionless on the stoop of her mud hut. With their ragged clothes and listless eyes, they look like castaways, adrift in an open sea of despair.
"The situation in my house is not good," offered Lepu, a withered mother with 12 people to feed.
On good days, she serves them one meal of chicken feed. On bad days, her children go without food.
Most days are bad.
"My children wash out the pot and put it in on the fire and expect me to cook something," she said. "I must tell them there's no food."
It's a refrain being heard in millions of households across southern Africa this year as the region faces mass starvation, the result of a deadly combination of drought, floods, grinding poverty and government mismanagement. The mounting food crisis threatens more than 12 million people living in a half-dozen countries.
"What is in the process of happening is actually the most serious humanitarian crisis that is taking place in the world today," said James Morris, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, speaking at a news conference in Johannesburg last week.
Here in this village of 2,000 people in the foothills of the jagged-peaked Dedza Mountains, 72 people have died of hunger-related illnesses, local health workers say. During the worst weeks of the crisis, so many villagers died that weary gravediggers started burying two bodies to a grave.
One of the villagers who lost his battle with hunger was Lepu's husband, a farmer and basket weaver. When the last grains of food ran out, he foraged for banana tree roots and grew ill. He died in February.
His death set off a chain reaction of tragedies for Lepu's family. Her husband dead, Lepu had no one to help out in the fields to attempt to plant another season's crop. Without a harvest, she had no dependable source of food for her children. Without food, she and her children grew weak and lost weight. Every few days, Lepu's breasts dry up, leaving her youngest daughter, 23-month-old Tiphetsa, without any milk.
So her family limps forward - bad day to good day - praying for better times. Sometimes she earns enough money selling firewood to buy a small bag of cornhusks, chaff of the corn milling process. It has no nutritional value and in any other year it would be used as chicken feed.
"It's not enough," she said.
Appeals for help
Yet for all of the hardships found in villages like Gwengwe, it could be worse. Southern Africa's food crisis is not yet considered famine. Visitors to Malawi will not see the skeletal figures that have come to define Africa's worst battles with starvation.
It's just such a disaster that aid organizations such as the World Food Program are scrambling to avoid in the six countries at risk: Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho. The WFP has launched an appeal for $507 million to feed an estimated 12.8 million people facing starvation during the next nine months. It has received pledges of $135 million, including $98 million from the United States.
About 3.1 million of those at risk live in Malawi, a tiny country about the size of Pennsylvania located in the Great Rift Valley. Most residents here make their living by subsistence farming and are accustomed to lean periods between harvests, skipping meals, watering down the maize to stretch it further. But this year, the belt tightening is starting even as this year's meager maize crop is harvested from the fields.
This is the second straight year of poor crops. Flooding, a late start to the rainy season needed for planting and a long dry spell at the beginning of this year have all contributed to dangerously low yields of maize, the country's staple food used to make a thick porridge called nsima.
Meanwhile, food prices have soared, making it impossible for the majority of Malawians - who live on less than $1 a day - to afford the most basic foods.
In February, the Malawi government declared a national disaster as families ran out of food and started eating unknown and often poisonous wild roots, berries and leaves.
"In one village we saw people eating dirt. It's something to give the sensation that they have full stomachs," said Kerren Hedlund, WFP's emergency officer in Malawi.
Residents here say the stomach cannot be fooled for long. After several weeks without proper meals, people suffering from treatable diseases such as malaria and cholera died because they were too weak.
Selling and stealing
Families sold livestock, clothing, pots, pans - anything to get another day of food. Thieves roamed the countryside, stealing goats, chickens and any maize they could find. Angry mobs dealt with the criminals harshly, beating, killing and maiming people caught stealing as little as two or three ears of corn.
"The people in the village went mad because they were stealing from each other," said Zakeyo Mose, 77, who lost some of his maize stores and a flock of chickens in late-night raids on his home in Gwengwe. "This hunger is more like war."
When the last crumbs of food disappeared at Lepu's home, she started selling her family's possessions. First, she sold the family goat. Then a new pair of underwear.
Now, there is nothing more to sell. Inside her mud hut is a battered metal pot, a blue plastic bowl and one toothbrush, its bristles worn away.
Aid workers worry most about families who have exhausted all their options to cope with hunger. Their meager food stores - if they were lucky enough to have any from this year's small crop - will soon run out. There is nothing more to sell. Food prices will continue to climb. Multiply this situation by hundreds of thousands of households, aid workers say, and all the ingredients are present for a major disaster.
The last time southern Africa faced a food crisis of this magnitude was in 1992, when a severe drought and food shortage put more than 18 million people at risk. The world responded with food aid and averted a larger crisis. Doing the same this time might be more difficult.
"The situation now is completely different. Not only do we have a national disaster; we also have a pandemic of HIV/AIDS, and it is ravaging this region," said Judith Lewis, the WFP's regional director for southern Africa.
Even in good times, families with people dead or dying of acquired immune deficiency syndrome struggle to meet health care costs, make up for lost labor in the fields or pay for funerals. A food shortage only worsens their plight.
Government hindrances
Nothing has frustrated aid agencies and donors more than the role that some African governments have played in creating this crisis.
In Zimbabwe, a country once considered the breadbasket of Africa with food to spare, President Robert G. Mugabe's government-led occupation of white-owned farms has disrupted agricultural production across the country. Combined with the effects of the drought, maize yields have fallen by more than 75 percent since 2000.
About 6 million people, nearly half of Zimbabwe's population, face starvation.
Malawi's government, with a reputation for corruption, drew worldwide criticism for its decision to sell its 167,000-ton strategic grain reserve last year when there were already signs that the country was headed for a severe food shortage.
Ellard S. Malindi, principal secretary of Malawi's Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, defended the sale, saying that the bulk of the grain was sold within Malawi and that the government acted on the advice of the International Monetary Fund, a claim the agency denies.
"What happened is that we didn't explain it very well. We allowed the public perception to be distorted," Malindi said. But the government's attempts to explain its sale have failed to put frustrated aid agencies and donors at ease.
"The numbers don't add up. Who got the grain? And for how much? These are questions that we are still analyzing," said Roger Yochelson, mission director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Malawi.
For Yochelson, the controversy illustrates the challenge facing southern Africa to solve its food shortages in the years ahead.
"It is not just a matter of rain. It is not enough to bring enough seed in or enough fertilizer. If the government doesn't manage its resources, then the children of today will spend the rest of their natural lives without enough food," he said.
The danger of such a future can be seen at St. Joseph's Hospital, about five miles outside Gwengwe. Each morning, dozens of malnourished mothers and children who qualify for the program line up outside the brick building for a basic meal of milk and porridge.
A 14-pound toddler
Modesta Biliati, 25, sat on the grass waiting for a meal with her two children, Velia, 2 1/2 years old, and Mayeso, 18 months.
Velia, however, appears smaller than her sister. A mere 14 pounds, Velia is less than half the normal weight for a child her age.
Asked about Velia's health, her mother displays the child's health certificate with a graph tracking her weight. A blue line marking monthly weight checks rises and falls, following the country's fortunes. The last month of a good harvest in July 2000, Velia weighed more than 16 pounds, about normal weight for her age at the time. One year later - after a poor harvest - the line on the graph plummeted to 12 pounds.
The regular meals she receives at the hospital have helped improve her health. But there will likely be long-term effects on her development, aid workers say.
"She started to crawl here. The food is giving her a lot more energy," her mother said.
For the village elders of Gwengwe, "the hunger," as they call it, has left them feeling powerless as leaders. They stood by and watched their villagers grow frustrated, steal from one another and then begin dying one by one.
On a recent afternoon, Bowa Gwengwe, an 82-year-old village leader, walked from grave to grave at the village cemetery recounting the victims.
"Here, we buried a husband and wife," he said, pointing to a large mound of dirt. Beside it stood a smaller, shorter mound.
"And here's their baby son," he said.
In any other year, this would be the season of weddings, a time when families prepare feasts, dance and thank God for providing for them. But this year, there is little to celebrate.
"We cannot have marriages," Gwengwe laughed, amused by the thought. "You have to have food to celebrate a wedding. And we have nothing to feed the people."
People in need
Country ...Population in need of food aid.....% of total pop.
Zimbabwe 6.1 million ....... ........... ............... ... 46
Malawi ..... 3.1 million ....... ............................... 28
Zambia ..... 2.3 million ..... ..................................21
Mozambique 0.5 million . ... ..................................3
Lesotho .... 0.4 million ..... .......................... .......20
Swaziland 0.2 million .... ...................... .............21
Source: World Food Program