Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat

By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A01

MARAMBA, Zambia -- She is sitting on a warped stool in a roofless market with the ferocious midday sun bearing down on her. A sinewy woman with deep-set eyes and sharp features that jut sphinxlike from under her black head scarf, Rose Shanzi awoke with a start this morning, and the primordial question that jarred her from sleep is stalking her again:

Will she and her children eat today?

It is always a compound question. With five children to feed, often there is not enough food to go around; tough choices have to be made. Still, all the answers Rose is searching for today lie in the neat rows of tomatoes arranged by size, ripeness and price on the wooden table standing at eye level before her.

"If I sell my tomatoes, we will eat today," she is saying simply. "If I don't, we don't eat."

To buy enough food to get her family through another day, Rose will need to earn roughly 75 cents.

Day in and day out, survival for one-fifth of the world's population turns on what others consider loose change. Much as one woman in a remote town in southern Africa tries to keep hunger at bay for just a little longer, so too are 1.3 billion others throughout the developing world who earn, on average, less than $1 a day.

The percentage of the world's population living on less than $1 a day is smaller than it was 10 years ago. But in absolute terms it has hardly budged in more than two decades, actually inching up slightly from its 1990 level, according to World Bank statistics, based on household surveys around the globe.

In this hardscrabble town on Zambia's southern border, nothing comes easily. The 75 cents that Rose needs to make ends meet is about 50 percent more than she ordinarily earns from her vegetable stand in a 12-hour day.

Moreover, the competition is stiff. Rose is one of no fewer than 4,000 vendors peddling everything from double-A batteries to zebra-skinned love seats at Maramba's sprawling market. At least a few dozen women here sell tomatoes just as red and ripe as Rose's.

And although the tomatoes cost just a few pennies per handful, customers are hard to come by. Jobs have evaporated since duty-free shipments of foreign-made clothes began pouring into Zambia a decade ago, shutting down virtually all of the textile factories here and in the nearby city of Livingstone.

"No one has money anymore," Rose is saying as she sizes up a woman who handled her vegetables but left without buying anything. "The town has no buying power. Selling anything is like squeezing blood from a stone."

The littlest of her children, 3-year-old Betty, finished off the family's last dollop of porridge this morning. No one else in the household has eaten in nearly a day, leaving Rose unsure if the knot in her stomach is hunger, or anxiety, or both.

She has not made as much as a cent today, and she's been sitting here for more than two hours now. There have been luckless days when she's gone home with nothing, and it is that possibility that preoccupies her now. Eyes shut, hands clenched tightly together in her lap, Rose bows her head in prayer. Resurfacing, she is smiling weakly, rejuvenated momentarily by faith, inspired by fear.

"If you are a mother," she is saying, her gaze fixed on the middle distance, "you don't know what suffering is until you have watched your babies go hungry. I have suffered many times."

Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the former Soviet Union, surviving on less than $1 daily is like living in a time warp, a universe of hand-to-mouth existences wholly untouched by technology's advance, the Berlin Wall's collapse, the torrents of cash flowing from one increasingly borderless country to another in this new epoch of surging global trade.

And nowhere has time stood as still as it has here: sub-Saharan Africa.

Following decades of colonial misrule and early experiments in socialism, nearly 40 African governments have adopted laissez-faire trade policies, submitting to the so-called structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund -- which reduce spending on public services and increase privatization -- in hopes of attracting foreign investment and loans.

Yet while sub-Saharan Africa's 640 million people represent about 10 percent of the world's population, the region accounts for only 2 percent of all international trade, less than it did during the last days of colonialism 50 years ago.

Zambia, a landlocked, butterfly-shaped nation of 10 million people, is as poor as Africa gets. Eight of every 10 Zambians live on less than $1 a day. Ruled by British mining concerns for more than a quarter-century, then colonized by the British in 1924, Zambia won independence 40 years later.

For the 27 years that followed, President Kenneth Kaunda pursued economic policies that joined government and the economy at the hip. Daunting trade barriers, massive state subsidies and onerous business regulations protected and steered a fragile economy heavily reliant on a single commodity: copper.

Inefficient and unproductive, propped up by foreign loans and dragged down by plunging copper prices, Kaunda's "humanist" system slid inexorably into collapse. Fed up with constant shortages of food and fuel and with Kaunda's authoritarian leadership, Zambians forced their independence hero to allow elections, then voted him out in 1991 in favor of a trade union leader promising reform, Frederick Chiluba.

Under Chiluba, Zambia eliminated tariffs on foreign goods, weaned farmers off practically all government subsidies and support, and sold more than 300 state-owned enterprises, including the country's copper mines. Virtually overnight, a socialist command economy had been replaced by a deregulated, free-market model.

The payoff so far is an economy fueled by little more than grit and guile, practically devoid of valuable commodities. Since 1992, Zambia has shed nearly 100,000 jobs; last month, mining giant Anglo American abandoned its attempt to make its Zambian copper mines profitable, putting 4,000 jobs in peril. Less than 10 percent of working-age Zambians work full time in the formal sector, leaving the jobless to sell whatever they can get their hands on at markets like the one here in Maramba -- or on the streets after dark. Police say prostitution has skyrocketed since 1992, especially in urban hubs such as Lusaka, Livingstone and Kitwe.

"You won't find many Zambians old enough to remember it who would want to return to the Kaunda era," said Fred M'membe, executive editor of the Post, an independent newspaper in Lusaka. "But you won't find anyone who will say that we're better off now than we were 10 years ago. No one alive today has ever seen such poverty. How do you run a modern economy when the vast majority of your earners are taking home pennies a day?"

"It seems I just woke up one morning and everything was gone." Rose is explaining how she got into the business of selling tomatoes.

That was four years ago, after her husband lost his job as a firefighter when the government began restructuring the workforce. That was after the last of the nearly 40 clothing manufacturers in Livingstone and Maramba shut down, unable to compete with secondhand goods pouring in from Europe and the United States.

What was she to do? She was a 40-year-old woman with a high school diploma, with four children and another on the way. There was no work to be had, so she did not look. There was no dole, so she could not wait. There was no charity, so she could not beg.

"If I cry or go to my neighbors, what good would that do?" Rose is saying. "They have nothing either. They are suffering just as much."

Friends who had lost their jobs at the local textile factories had begun selling vegetables and charcoal that they purchased from wholesalers. Rose decided to join them.

The number of vendors at the Maramba market, which opened in 1952, remained constant for nearly 40 years, then tripled over the next 10 as unemployment swelled.

"My husband was dying along with the town," Rose is saying of her husband's slow disintegration from kidney failure. He died a year ago, a broken man in a broken town.

"I think not being able to support his family is what really killed him. He was a proud man. He hated not being the breadwinner. But it was the only way we could make it. All of my neighbors work here at the market. For most of us, it is the only way to survive."

She is saying this when a lithe figure with braided hair and a featureless, torn dress appears as if dropped from the sky, hurtling into Rose's lap with playful fury.

"Mama, I am hungry," 10-year-old Ennelis is saying as Rose gathers the girl up in her arms. It is the girl's summer vacation, and she awoke to a house with no food.

"Then help me work," Rose is saying to her.

The girl is like a talisman today. Within 30 minutes of her arrival, three customers appear at the tomato stand, forking out about 8 cents apiece for a handful of the medium-size tomatoes. Ennelis, who worked the vegetable stand alone for three weeks last year when her mother was bedridden with malaria, rips scraps of paper from one of Zambia's independent newspapers, the Monitor. An editorial laments the failure of Chiluba's economic policies. Ennelis wraps the tomatoes inside.

Rose hates to count money during the day. She is afraid that there are too many idle young men around waiting to snatch a day's revenue from some unsuspecting woman's hand.

So she usually hides the crumpled, faded bills underneath the plain, white doily on her table. The newspaper provides Rose with both something to do in between customers and an idea of how business is going that day.

"If you are just reading bits and pieces of a story at the end of the day, you have made good money," Rose is saying. "If you have a lot to read at the end of the day, then you have not made very much money. If I have used up most of my newspaper today, I will be able to buy maybe two small bags of maize meal, and that is all I need to make me happy today."

Ask just about anyone in southern Africa what it means to go hungry, or what constitutes a food shortage, and they will say they are without "maize meal," or "mealie meal," depending on the country. It is all the same thing: the region's all-purpose staple, used to make porridge for breakfast and nshima for lunch and dinner and any meal in between.

Nshima -- called sadza in Zimbabwe, pap in South Africa -- is the color of grits, the consistency of polenta. Zambians eat it with just about everything. Sprinkled with groundnuts, chopped okra or maybe just some sugar, it is a meal in itself when little else is available.

"If you don't like nshima," said Judith Namakube, a vendor at the Maramba market who sells oranges and other fruits, "you aren't Zambian."

Relatively speaking, Rose does better than many other Zambians. Her husband left her with a two-bedroom home. She has no electricity, relying on kerosene lamps and candles for light, charcoal for heat and fire. But with a tap in her back yard, she does have access to clean water, saving the time it would take to fetch it from faraway wells or dealing with waterborne illnesses such as cholera.

And Rose has been able to make the most of her meager earnings by joining a relief agency project that provides small loans to poor entrepreneurs. The money is not much, maybe $20 every six months. But it tides Rose over in particularly rough times, ensuring that she has a steady supply of tomatoes to sell.

"It is not a lot of money," said Joshua Tom, a project coordinator for CARE, the U.S.-based relief agency that runs the microlending fund here. "But it can mean the difference between life and starvation for a lot of people here."

Living on $1 a day makes budgeting difficult, but also reduces it to a few simple priorities.

Of Rose's profits from the stand -- roughly $12 to $18 per month -- half goes for food. About $2 goes for the fees charged by Ennelis's public school. She pays $2 a month for water, another $1.50 in property taxes and 50 cents for the government's health insurance plan. Whatever is left goes to pay off her loan from CARE.

Health insurance for the whole family would cost double what Rose pays for herself, so whenever other family members get sick and need to go to the clinic, they simply pretend to be Rose. That works fine for Rose and her four daughters, but when her 20-year-old son came down with malaria last year, employees at the local clinic wanted to know how he came to be named for a woman.

"He told them that his parents really, really wanted a girl," Rose is saying, dabbing her eyes while laughing at a rare triumph.

Water, education and health care were free during most of Kaunda's rule, and it rankles her that she now has to pay for basic services.

"That's money I could spend on meat," Rose is saying testily. The family eats meat only once a year, usually at Christmas when Rose splurges. "It's rubbing salt in our wounds to take jobs away from the people and then make them pay for things they cannot afford because they're not working."

Another customer wanders by, followed by another maybe an hour later. By 3 p.m., Rose has earned a little more than half of what she needs to buy two three-pound bags of maize meal, meaning that the market's end-of-the-day rush will make or break her. The few people in town with jobs usually stop at the market on their way home, but it's anyone's guess whether they will need any tomatoes or if they will choose Rose's over those of the dozen or so other vendors who sell them.

Still, Rose is feeling confident. Perhaps more important, she wants Ennelis to feel confident, safe, to believe that she will have food today.

"Children should not live with such grown-up worries," she will say later.

So she gives the girl the equivalent of about 12 cents and sends her off to buy vegetables for this evening's nshima. An act of faith.

"Pick out what you want to eat with the nshima and take them home for you and your sister to chop," she is saying to Ennelis, whose right hand is outstretched in anticipation. She skips off happily.

The market is a hive, snatches of color and sound and chaos that flit across the landscape like reels in a movie: young men pushing wheelbarrows; an old toothless man holding a squawking chicken in a plastic bag; barefoot children weaving through the vendors' stands, chasing one another; women squinting in the sun from their misshapen stools.

Rose is beckoning a boy to fetch her a cup of tea for a nickel. It has been nearly 24 hours since she last ate anything.

"This is what I usually have for lunch," she is saying. "It settles an empty stomach."

Then, a flurry of customers. Rose springs from her stool. A woman buys one of Rose's biggest tomatoes for about 12 cents. A young man in a tie buys another. A woman who attends the same church as Rose palms three of the small ones and hands Rose about 8 cents.

"Rose, I am skinny, but you are really getting skinny," she is saying as Rose wraps her tomatoes in newspaper. "You are going to look as old as me if you don't eat."

"This life we live makes us old before we are ready," Rose is saying as she hands the package across the table.

The sun is setting when Rose returns to her stool and retrieves the scraps of newspaper from underneath her table. She sizes up her surroundings and, seeing no signs of danger, pulls the wrinkled bills from underneath her doily. She melts into her seat while she counts:

Three thousand nine hundred Zambian kwachas. About 97 cents. Rose is smiling as she rises from her stool to go buy the maize meal that she promised her daughter, then start her 30-minute walk home.

"Ah," she is saying as she stretches her arms toward the sky, "today we are rich."

© 2002 The Washington Post Company