Back from the land of the lost

TODAY, I have travelled south from Lusaka, Zambia, to Monze District. Once the breadbasket of Zambia, this area has been devastated by a series of catastrophes.

The people once had herds of cattle, but many have lost them to disease in recent years. Families have also been decimated by the HIV/Aids epidemic, leaving grandparents and extended families responsible for large numbers of children. Now they have been hit by a drought which is the worst anyone can remember.

In the Keemba area in north- west Monze, the rains that usually fall in November did not come until January 24, and then it was dry again until February. It rained only on these two occasions, we were told by the local agricultural co-ordinator Frank Lubasi. The people we met showed us the dried-up fields from which they had harvested little, or in most cases, nothing at all.

In Ncheema village we met a grandmother of 92, who with her widowed daughter, is caring for 18 orphaned children. They make a little money collecting and selling wild herbs, but it is nothing like enough. They have lost all their cattle to disease and they have no maize from their fields. Asked how they will survive, the grandmother, Saliya, says: "We don't know - by the grace of God we will survive somehow."

Their neighbour Enny Mazuba lived with her husband and two of their four children, the youngest aged 12. They had no food, so Enny walked for three days to a commercial plantation to find work.

While she was there, she received a message that her husband Simon had died of hunger. She returned to the village with the little maize she had saved.

Yesterday, she sold her only hen in return for a chick and a bowl of maize. Neighbours have also helped them, but soon this whole community will have run out of food.

Starvation

At the hospital in Monze, little Lena Lusonde, aged six, and her baby brother Mizinga, 10 months, are suffering from severe malnutrition. Their mother Sylvia says: "The situation is bad - if we don't get food we will all be dying of starvation."

These stories reflect a wider crisis affecting countries across southern Africa. Millions of children will be hungry and sick if we cannot get emergency help to them soon. None of the children we met was going to school - their families can't afford to send them.

They are weak and needed at home to collect water and help the families to survive.

UNICEF is providing help in all the affected countries, including emergency feeding for severely malnourished children to try to keep children in school so that they can imagine a better future.

Water supplies in areas where wells and boreholes are drying up. There is inadequate sanitation, immunisation and basic medicines to prevent and treat the diseases that often break out in such emergencies, especially diarrhoea and measles.

We need your help. Thank you so much for the support you have given. If we are to raise the funds that are so desperately and urgently needed if children like Lena and Mizinga and the children of Monze and the other affected areas are to survive and see a better future.

We need their message to reach as many people as possible, who may be able to spare a donation to the Evening News Southern Africa Children's Appeal.

Tonight I am returning to London, deeply saddened by what I have seen here, and in Malawi, and what I know is happening in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland and Lesotho. I am more committed than ever to finding the funds we need to provide life-saving help. Will you help me? It really means a great deal to me, and more importantly to the children of southern Africa.