Lesotho

Real lives

Lesotho's drought - a national disaster and a personal tragedy

© UNICEF/2002/BELMONTE

Three-week old Mapeko was abandoned by her mother, who placed her in a plastic bag in the hospital toilet. Police tried to trace her family, but the details on the hospital records proved to be fake. Mapeko is now at Beautiful Gate.

7 October 2002, MASERU - You don't need to visit Lesotho's unplowed fields to see the real impact of the drought. This national disaster is all too evident in the faces and tragic stories of ordinary people.

Four-month old Rapelang's mother died giving birth to him. He was her twelfth child and despite the family's best efforts to raise him, they simply could not cope.

"They tried to keep Rapelang alive by feeding him sugared water, having him suck it from a wet cloth," says Sue Haakonsen, the director of Lesotho's sole care facility for abandoned infants, Beautiful Gate. "Sometimes they gave him chili chili - a porridge that is watered down so much that an infant can drink it. Had he not come here, he would have been malnourished and become just another statistic."

The mountain kingdom of Lesotho is a country of breath-taking beauty and mind-numbing statistics. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, with more than half of its 2.2 million people trapped below the poverty line. The maternal mortality rate is one of the worst in Southern Africa, the HIV/AIDS rate is one of the worst in the world and the teenage pregnancy rate is 52 per cent - all this in a country where more than half the population is under the age of 25.

And now, there is the drought.

Food alone is not the answer

"Lesotho has no room for absorbing another shock," says Kimberly Gamble-Payne, the UNICEF Representative in Lesotho. "Even at the best of times, people in Lesotho live only on the margins. In times like this, in times of crisis, the margins disappear. So, if you only look at food to solve this, you've missed the point. What we have here is a convergence of other things, poverty and HIV/AIDS foremost among them."

© UNICEF/2002/BELMONTE

The First Lady of Lesotho, Mrs. Mathato Mosisili, feeds one of the abandoned children taken into Beautiful Gate's care.

When the margins disappear, the danger is people start to believe their options disappear, too.

UNICEF, the government's Ministry of Social Welfare and non-governmental organization Save the Children Lesotho, have begun a rapid assessment of infant abandonment in certain areas of the country. The aim is to find out what happens to these infants and what can be done to save them and help their families.

On the first day of the study, the assessment team went to Mohale Hoek, some 80 kilometres south of the capital. Social welfare workers say abandoned babies are one of the major problems in this district, but in the two-room police headquarters of this town, the commanding officer had an even more disturbing story. The problem over the past several months has not been abandoned babies, but dead ones.

"We have had 10 cases over the past year," says Superintendent Mokhele. "They are mothers, mostly between the ages of 15 and 19. They are alone and scared. Many come here from rural areas expecting to get jobs, but if they don't get jobs, they don't have much of a future. They are children themselves, and often have nothing to eat."

The young mothers deliver their babies, but leave the infants in dongas (steeply eroded riverbanks and channels) to die. The police find the infants and trace the mothers easily.

"We know the mothers because we see when they are pregnant," says Mokhele. "When we ask them why they did it, they say, 'I have done it because I don't know how to care for my child.' They are taken to Magistrate's Court and charged with concealment of children. They end up in jail for 2-3 years."

Key people and key actions

"We need to attack chronic problems in what is now a full blown emergency," explains Gamble-Payne. "That means making sure mothers know they'll get the food and help they need to keep [themselves] and their babies alive. Things like therapeutic feeding for severely malnourished infants and children [and] emergency supplementary feeding for children under five. But it also means UNICEF must play a key role in bringing like-minded people together to make things happen. We need to get people together to solve problems together. When you bring them together you can make miracles happen in Lesotho."

"If we bring children into the world, we have a responsibility to care for them, that is clear," says Lesotho's First Lady, Mrs. Mathato Mosisili. "But to deal with what is happening in Lesotho, food alone is not the answer. This year it's drought. Next year it's floods. If we don't make our people sustainable, then we aren't helping them. They can be helped with jobs, with ways of providing for themselves and their families. Then, next time we have a disaster we [will] have something to fall back on and not be dependent on aid from the outside."

UNICEF Lesotho has appealed for $3,045,000 to fund its response to the crisis. So far, only 1 per cent of that amount has been received.