I was visiting some of the township areas yesterday morning with colleagues who work on community mobilization and providing social assistance to poor urban residents, especially to victims of "Operation Murambatsvina". Many of the estimated 700,000 persons whose homes were destroyed under that government operation in 2005 (Murambatsvina means "Clean out the Filth" in Shona) are still, 2 years later, living in the open in abominable conditions. In Mbare, while we were chatting with a group of Murambatsvina survivors (mostly women and widows), one woman told us that she had discovered the body of a neighbor that very morning, 2 or 3 hours before our arrival.
The woman proceeded to flip open the "door" to the shanty (which was nothing more than a piece of old tattered cloth), to reveal the body of a young woman on the ground. The woman had no family members (not uncommon according to our colleagues) and her neighbors were afraid to report her death to the police, and had no money to have her body transported to the mortuary or for a burial.
So they had just left the body inside the plastic and scrap covered shanty. The woman, a neghbor, who'd discovered the body was the last to see the deceased woman alive, the night before around 8 PM. She had said that she had not eaten in 3 days. Her neighbor did not have food to offer her but gave her water to drink. When she looked in on her in the morning, she found her dead.
The neighbors of the woman said they were afraid to inform the police because they said the police considered them "criminals" and would beat them or even accuse them of killing the woman.
We organized the money to have the body taken to the mortuary and for a funeral and burial (the equivalent of $75.00). Our colleagues said that there is usually a 2 to 3 day wait to have a plot at the cemetery (for which one must pay) because there are so many deaths happening each day.
This is the cost of the Mugabe regime's ruthless and sanguinary policies...
