Zimbabwe's lost generation

Times:

Shouly’s brow is knitted with worry as she counts through the family’s last few notes. There are five mouths to feed and that is before the rent and school fees have to be paid. “We’re overwhelmed,” she sighs. “The numbers just don’t add up.”

Caroline sits cradling Prince, 6, his tiny fingers wrapped around her thin arms as she thoughtfully strokes his feet. He has outgrown the shoes she bought for him to go to school and there is no money for new ones. “At least we get help from the Church so he can go to school,” she says. “Education is the most important thing.”

From dawn to dusk, adult worries fill their heads, the buzz of them drowning out the rumbles of their underfed stomachs. But Shouly and Caroline are not young mothers, they are children themselves, thrust into adulthood before they even hit puberty in Zimbabwe’s topsy-turvy present.

Walk into any village, any township, in Zimbabwe, and gradually you will sense that something is missing. There are children, playing in the dust with dried-out mealie cobs. There are old people sitting under the shade of a tree, swatting away the flies. But where is the generation in between, the twenty, thirty, fortysomethings on which most countries’ economies and societies depend?

Shouly’s parents died of Aids, only months apart, when she was 12, leaving her the head of her family.

Caroline’s father was shot dead when she was 10, by an armed robber in South Africa where he had gone to work as a physiotherapist as jobs in Zimbabwe dried up. Her mother died two years later from tuberculosis brought on by Aids. At 12, Caroline became de facto mother to her brothers Marcus, 10, and Prince, 8 months. “It was very hard,” Caroline says, the pain of loss still evident on her young face.

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The country has been ravaged by Aids, but it has also been ravaged by a despot who has ruined the economy and left many to die of hunger and other diseases, because there is no medicine. The survival of this next generation may defend on getting the despot out of power.

Gateway Pundit reports that South African dock workers and truckers have refused to unload the Chicom weapons that were to be delivered to Zimbabwe. The new government should hopefully be able to get a refund and use the money for more urgent needs.