“As you can see, the cattle are drinking from the same pit as us. Their urine is right there… it is not very healthy,” she says.
“I have never seen anything like this.”
Food is also in short supply in Zimbabwe where 7.7 million people face hunger. In Mudzi the number of families who have access to a sufficient amount of affordable, nutritious food has dropped by more than half compared to previous years, the local health authority says.
Children have been particularly impacted – since June hospital admissions for youngsters with moderate to severe malnutrition have doubled.
A village feeding programme is trying to tackle the problem. Once a week women in the community gather, bringing whatever produce they have in order to contribute to a porridge for under fives.
Ground baobab fruit, peanut butter, milk and leafy green vegetables are stirred into the porridge to add extra nutrients.
But the list of ingredients shrinks every week – cow-peas and beans recently became unavailable because of the poor harvests.
The government, with the support of partners like the UN children’s agency, Unicef, devised the village feeding scheme and it used to run at least three times a week.
“But because of the El Niño drought we are now only giving it once a week,” explains Kudzai Madamombe, Mudzi district’s medical officer.
“Because the rains didn’t come, we suffered a 100% loss in terms of all the crop,” he adds, saying the programme might be forced to stop altogether in the next month as food stocks dwindle.
Clinics providing Zimbabweans in Mudzi with vital healthcare have also been affected – boreholes that supply a quarter of clinics in the district with water have run dry, Mr Madamombe says.
And the major dam in the district has only a month’s supply of water left.
As a result vegetable irrigation schemes, including one which supported 200 local farmers, have been suspended.
The misery is everywhere. Tambudzai Mahachi, 36, says she planted acres of maize, cow-peas and peanuts on her plot.
For all her hard work, she got nothing at all, not even a plate of food. Even her hardy baobab tree produced hardly any fruit.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
