Church Leaders: Zimbabwe Health Services, People Collapsing

[joanne_h]

By: Eric YoungChristian Post ReporterPosted: Monday, 24 November 2008, 16:50 (EST)Font Scale:A A ABelievers in Zimbabwe are waiting for God to intervene as life-threatening difficulties continue to face the people of the nation. In the meantime, church leaders familiar with the plight of Zimbabwe’s people are encouraging believers outside of the country to intervene on God’s behalf by making donations over the next four to five critical weeks. "God is calling us to share, to walk with the hungry and, to the best of our knowledge, speak on behalf of the voiceless,” said the Rev. Benyam A. Kassahun, Southern Africa program director for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Global Mission organization. “We are called to share from what we have, share from what is at our table,” he stated this past week after traveling to Zimbabwe last month. “That is what the gospel is to me, what I have come to realize. To feed the hungry is where I find hope and where God wants us all to be." Currently, Zimbabwe faces a nightmarish economic meltdown that is spiraling out of control, with inflation at more than 231 million percent. Half of the population is in need of emergency food aid, and there is a deadly outbreak of cholera in the capital city of Harare due to lack of basic services. Kassahun described the situation in Zimbabwe as "a human disaster." Among those who suffer most are "children, especially those under five, and pregnant women, who do not know if they will be able to give birth just because they are hungry," he said, according to the ELCA. Even nurses at the hospitals are collapsing because they are so hungry, Kassahun added. "I've never seen this kind of disaster and death," he said. The food crisis began after 2000, when Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe launched an often violent campaign to seize white-owned farms, disrupting the economy of what had been the region's breadbasket. The farms were to have gone to poor blacks, but many went to veterans of Mugabe’s guerrilla war against white rule over the former British colony. Since then, agricultural production plummeted and one of Africa’s best economies found itself faced with a meltdown that included the world’s highest inflation rate and a staggering unemployment rate, which currently stands between 80 to 85 percent. To help make sense of the inflation rate, which jumped from 11.2 million percent in June to 231 million percent in July, the Rev. Rafael Malpica-Padilla, ELCA Global Mission executive director, took the example of a pastor whose monthly salary is about 300,000 Zimbabwean dollars. “That salary only buys one loaf of bread,” he said. “But, even if you have money, there is no food to buy.” So bad is the food situation that some villagers resort to plucking undigested corn kernels from cow dung to wash and eat. Beetles, crickets, and termites also can make a meal.