Suffering – a Christian Response
June 15th, 2005
This week I had an opportunity to visit a church in southern Matabeleland with my pastor, let’s call him Pastor Dumisani (not his real name). We arrived in the early morning after driving for some time from Bulawayo—seeing nothing but barren fields and bleached grass. On arrival we were greeted warmly by the local pastor’s wife weari
ng a towel wrapped round her torso. She had not expected us.
While we waited for the pastor I looked around the immaculate muzi, or homestead, and admired a fine rooster and a hen with her chicks dashing after her. When he arrived we wandered towards the fields, past his small kraal for his only cow. There we admired a substantial fence made from bush posts and wire, but through it we saw only pale, sighing sorghum stalks: a total crop failure. This means there is little to eat. In times like this the women go and forage in the bush for wild fruit and vegetables but this does not make up for a stomach-filling staple such as maize. The last time the entire village of 270 families received maize was in February, from World Vision. A bag per family, enough for one month. The state has been frustrating feeding programmes.
This one-hundred-member church has recently been given three tonnes of maize-meal and some fortified porridge meal by Christian friends. Currently, families here are subsisting on one meal a day and the children go to school with nothing but water in their stomachs, often fainting from hunger. Last year they used to look forward to coming to school because they were given a bowl of nutritional porridge which made them enthusiastic pupils. Now they hardly have the energy to get there.
Villagers try to raise money to send their children to school, frequently paying the fees off a little at a time. Recently, however, parents who have been unable to pay the fees have been required to do community service and have been expected to clean the police camp grounds, for instance. Community work is normally reserved as a punishment for criminals and the parents feel thoroughly humiliated at having their poverty paraded like this.
We shook our heads at the empty field, went on to another neat muzi and met some more villagers. There was a small middle-aged woman, dressed in a crimplene suit several sizes too big for her who was talking loudly and seemed very upset. It turned out she was one of several women who try to make a little money growing vegetables, carting water from a distant dam to water them. These vegetables are sold from the roadside, along with wild fruit collected from the bush, to passing motorists.
But now this has been stopped. The frenzy of destruction that has recently swept our towns in the name of ‘cleaning up the cities’—where street-traders and shack-dwellers have lost everything—has spread to the country. The day before, police confiscated their wares (even the wild fruit) and chased the women away telling them they were not allowed to do this now. She was angry and despairing:
“What can I do?†she said, “Even if I run away the police know where I live and will find me.â€
We did the only thing we could think of: we praised God in song and prayed to him for help. The woman seemed unable to pray. Shaking dry, calloused hands we said good-bye and left. As we were walking back Dumisani told me that you would never know if people were starving; even if they had not eaten for three days they would not tell you, because they did not want others to know. Why do they live there? Because they have nowhere else to go, Dumisani said.
Although I was heavy hearted I felt a deep respect and admiration for a people who had survived countless droughts and pitiless governments. Jack Kuhatschek wrote:
We can never escape from suffering in a fallen world. Neither can we rise mystically above the wounds it inflicts. But we can learn to endure it in a way that brings personal growth and glory to God.
This is what I took away from that poverty-stricken village.
Zimbabwe, Starvation,
