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Drought Magnifies Hunger, Suffering of Children in Malawi
Anna Bande, a nurse, jots down a baby's weight as it is read out by Goodson Fobrica, a community volunteer. Bande said rarely has she seen so many hungry children.
(By Craig Timberg -- The Washington Post)
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Under the mango tree, Tisunganane Matumbo, 3, dangled from the scale with a look of terror in his eyes. As he hung there in a loose-fitting baby-blue outfit, the volunteer read out his weight.
The news was not good: Tisunganane had lost two of his 30 pounds in the past month. He also had been getting fevers, reported his mother, Patricia Matumbo, 30, who has four other children.
"There's no food at home," she explained. "Last year everything was dried out. Nobody harvested anything."
A few minutes later, in another line beside another mango tree, Bande began examining scores of children. She pulled down their eyelids to look for the yellowish tint of jaundice, felt skin for fever and probed stomachs for signs of severe malnutrition or other ailments.
After Bande had seen about 50 children, she was handed a plump 1-year-old girl. She declared with a bright smile, and a hint of surprise, "A healthy baby."
It was, she said, only the second she had seen all day.
When it was Tisunganane's turn, Bande found a belly that was swollen. Because of the boy's declining weight and recurrent fevers, she diagnosed both malnutrition and malaria. Bande gave Tisunganane's mother a full course of malaria medicine and urged her to somehow find more food for her son to eat.
With luck, Bande said, he would begin recovering soon.
The news was not as good for a 4-year-old girl with skin rashes, mouth sores and a growth chart showing that she had spent her brief lifetime falling short of weight targets. Bande urged the mother to bring her daughter to the hospital immediately.
But she also suspected the child had advanced AIDS, which meant there were limits to what could be done.
Malawi has an estimated 65,000 children under the age of 5 with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
While nations such as South Africa have sharply cut transmission of the virus from mothers to children through one-time doses of nevirapine, the antiretroviral drug is only just beginning to be deployed widely in Malawi's rural areas. The country's per-capita income of $170 a year is one of the lowest in the world, and abject poverty makes breast-feeding, which can also pass the virus to infants, a necessity for many.
