Last year VICKI MASON was the WA winner of the World Vision Study Tour competition. A 16-year-
old, year 11 student, she travelled to Zimbabwe and witnessed the devastating toll a three-year drought has had.
On our first day we visited Chambuta refugee camp for Mozambicans. "Equipped" for 2000, it was home to more than 25,000. We took with us four tonnes of protein biscuits and found children eating dirt and leaves to fill their emaciated bodies.
These people narrowly escaped death, fleeing from war-
torn Mozambique, often without loved ones. A wall in the administrator's office is covered with pictures of children lost in the desperate escape.
One girl we found near the end of our day at Chambuta was severely malnourished and suffering from dysentery. She was too weak to move, and no-one had noticed her. For most of us it was too much. I stood looking at a child who symbolised the pain and suffering of millions I had seen through the media at home but had always kept at a comfortable distance.
I hated myself for not having done something earlier to try to combat such immense suffering.
But at the same time I felt uplifted to be part of World Vision. The kids treated us almost as if we were celebrities. And even though we have everything and they nothing, their hope and happiness made me think ashamedly of how little we appreciate, or even realise, what we have here in Australia.
We drove along roads littered with the dry bones of cattle and huge recesses in the ground which once were lakes and rivers. They held not a drop of water.
Women with sunken eyes, walking apparitions, trudged 30 kilometres three times a day to scavenge half a cup of filthy, diseased water. Their entire existence was taken up with finding enough water to maintain life in the often 50 degree heat.
We visited an illegal gold panning site at a place called Christmas Lake, where hundreds of people slept in garbage bags by the lake where they panned, washed in and drank the putrid water.
I met a family which had lost two friends killed the week before when rocks collapsed on them as they tried to dig deeper in the search for gold.
I befriended the little girl of the family, Reita. She had none of the usual sprightliness of children her age. She walked carrying her baby brother. He was not yet one but he coughed up blood, sick from the filthy water he drinks and the little amount of food he eats.
However, these people are given a second chance with the help of aid organisations. Long-term solutions are undertaken to get the people back on their feet.
A big priority is health. Children are immunised, their weight and general health monitored. the general improvement in the health of the kids plus education being made available about birth control means the birth rate is kept under control.
Another health problem that has to be addressed is the new plague sweeping the globe that finds an ally in poverty, AIDS.
Education holds the key to escape from the vicious circle of the third world. The people are taught to manage the land.
At one project a dam was built to catch the torrents of rain that follow a drought. Fields were made ready to grow grain and a piggery was established so that once they had grain they could fatten the pigs. All they were waiting for was the rains, and World Vision would have put them back on their feet.
In Zimbabwe, I had the best and worst two weeks of my life. I found inspiration in what love and money from people who care in Australia can do.
The World Vision 40-hour famine is fast approaching. I urge anyone and everyone to be involved in it. Forty hours without food is well worth it knowing a fellow human has been given a second chance.