A nun's story from a stricken Zimbabwe
As we slowly recover from over-eating at Christmas, spare a thought for a heroic Irish Dominican nun.
Patricia Walsh is 66. Her roots and her heart are in Athlone, but she has been working in Zimbabwe for 35 years. I recently heard her on the radio, expressing her hopes and despair over the country she had dedicated her life to.
Never has she seen such hunger as today. By the end of January, more than five million people will need food-aid to stay alive.
Their only crime, she says, is to be poor and brow-beaten in a land without oil. This makes it of little concern to the affluent West.
It deeply troubles her that in rural hospitals even the nurses are always hungry. They ask why feed dying patients and not us who are needed to tend them? Their salary will not buy them one meal a month. They can't afford to travel to work.
suffering
She and her comrades work in an encampment called the Hatcliffe Extension. It houses 40,000 of the poorest in Harare. There are 10,000 children, many suffering from Aids. Even when anti-viral drugs are available, many of the starving refuse them. They need all their strength to stay alive.
Three years ago, Mugabe's crowd bulldozed the Extension.
Sister Walsh found two little boys next to their ruined hut. Their mother was dead.
A grandmother asked: "Sister, why has God abandoned us?"
She doesn't even try to answer the unanswerable.
- Peter DeRosa
