In Zimbabwe, families agonize as lives slip away

BUDIRIRO, Zimbabwe - A bony limb flops from the wheelbarrow in limp resignation. A head lolls amid the pile of blankets. A woman is trundling her elderly mother home from a clinic to die.

In Zimbabwe's cholera-ravaged townships, the dying make their final journey home in wheelbarrows and pushcarts, sent away from clinics by nurses too overworked and underpaid to care much about who survives.

One 71-year-old man, Tarcisius Nerutanga, had to carry his dying 27-year-old son, Allan, home during the weekend. When Nerutanga was summoned to the clinic in Budiriro township, he found Allan dumped on a wooden bench outside, racked by severe vomiting and diarrhea.

"They didn't say anything. They just said, 'Take him home,' " Nerutanga said, as his wife, Loveness, sat on the concrete floor in their tiny room, weeping silently. Allan Nerutanga died Monday.

Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic has killed at least 775 people and sickened more than 16,000, the United Nations reported yesterday.

Under normal circumstances, the waterborne disease is relatively easy to treat. In Zimbabwe, it is spreading uncontrolled amid the country's economic collapse and political turmoil as the 28-year-old regime of President Robert Mugabe clings to power after disputed elections.

A tangle of problems makes the disease intractable: decaying water-system infrastructure; sewage pipes left unrepaired; governmental failure to buy water-treatment chemicals or collect garbage; a lack of nurses because of low wages; a shortage of medicines; poverty; and declining literacy because of the education system's collapse.

In one area of Budiriro, a township hit hard by cholera, swallows swooped in arcs over the green pools of sewage alongside the streets. Children with soccer balls made from plastic bags played in the streets, leaping across channels of raw waste.

There was a makeshift latrine nearby for the entire neighborhood, placed behind a sagging plastic wall.

The burden of caring for the dying often falls to the families.

In the last hours of his son's life, Tarcisius Nerutanga lifted Allan's body onto his knee, hugged him and begged him to cling to life. Loveness Nerutanga kept feeding and cleaning Allan, silently praying.

Allan Nerutanga died grieving that his life was over before he could rescue his parents from their grinding poverty, his mother recalled.

"He just said, 'Mom, we're a laughingstock. We die a laughingstock.' "