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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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And though Malawi's rapidly expanding antiretroviral program has delivered free, lifesaving drugs to 30,000 adults, it has not yet reached children, many of whom will die before the pediatric versions of the medicine become available here. Government officials predict those drugs will arrive late next year.
Even for those children who escape infection, having a parent with AIDS is nearly as deadly. Fathers become too weak to earn money. Mothers stop laboring in fields and often lack the strength even to produce enough breast milk to nourish their babies.
Such was the case with the last mother in Bande's line, a thin woman whose 2-month-old twins -- a boy and a girl -- had shrunk from more than 7 pounds to about 4 1/2 . They had the shriveled look of hungry baby birds, with desperate, pleading eyes.
"The mother has HIV. That's what I'm suspecting," Bande said. "These ones, we are going to take care."
As the sickest children examined that day, they were loaded into the back of the hospital's white truck for the short drive back to Trinity Hospital, where they could get treatment and their mother, were she to test positive for HIV, could soon start on antiretroviral drugs.
Once stronger, Bande said, the woman could more easily breastfeed the twins. Even if that increased the likelihood that they too would get the virus, it was their only realistic option.
But the three hours the nurse spent weighing, examining and treating children in Mbadzo came at a price. While Bande was away from the hospital, another mother with another desperately ill child vanished.
Esmie Nyasangudza, 29, had arrived at Trinity Hospital in an ambulance with her daughter, 11-month-old Gertrude, two weeks earlier. Gertrude had the thin, orange-tinted hair of the severely malnourished, as well as diarrhea, fever, mouth sores and thin, floppy arms. She was refusing what little food -- mostly cassava porridge -- there was at home. During her stay in intensive care, an intravenous tube taped to the left side of her head had provided Gertrude with enough nutrition to marginally improve her condition. She had begun to breast feed and was soon to be moved to another ward.
But Nyasangudza, after learning she had HIV, abruptly left the next morning with the baby. They ventured into a parched countryside with the little available food, and Bande said she feared both would soon die.
She paced around the hospital in frustration, asking other nurses if they knew where the mother and baby had gone, or even which direction they had headed.
None did.
Even if Nyasangudza had stayed, Bande acknowledged that with a child as sick as Gertrude, her chances of surviving this hungry season were slim.
"But," Bande said, "it's better to do something."
