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Thursday July 9, 1998 - Today we took the bus to Sionsundu from Dete. We got at noon to a school here. At one point I got very upset because I got very hungry and only had white bread and peanut butter. Later I had 2 huge bowls of brown rice with tomato sauce and felt a lot better. As a vegetarian I learned to survive on brown rice and oatmeal and brown bread. I had a lot of trouble with white bread or white rice, because when I ate them, I was hungry 2 hours later. I would hate to ever be malnourished. Our entire extended family experienced this in World War II in the Netherlands and Germany. I see how frightening it is. I did see in this area only, the poorest part of Zimbabwe Shinge said, some people who looked malnourished. Mothers were breastfeeding their babies, but it looked like their was not enough milk there for them in their breasts. I also saw people with eye problems. I do not know if it was from lack of vitamin A. This area in the western part of the country is still suffering from the drought of 1992. Here there were no vendors selling bananas, avocados, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, like there were in the eastern part of the country. Also the rural stores here only had white bread, corned beef, peanut butter maybe, and maize meal, nothing more. This was the only time on trip I saw real poverty. The director of the Quaker appropriate technology centre that we stayed at said children would walk 10 km each way to get to their school of grades 1 through 4. Aside from the education, they came for the lunch that they provided. Tomorrow we will pedal at 6am to the ferry at Mlibizi on Lake Kariba.
