into the jaws

She's a student at Africa University. It's the end of the semester and she's desperate to go back to see her family in Harare for the Christmas holidays. There's just one problem: the family live in Budiriro township, the epicentre of Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic.

"Don't go," I say immediately as I hand her a cup of soup (Super Chicken Noodle sent by mum -- should it be this watery?)

It'll be fine, she says ("and this soup is great"). There have only been two cholera cases in her area (Two? Isn't that two too many?)

Her part of Budiriro is the part near Glen View, the old part. They haven't had running water for a matter of years now: her father brings containers of water from the office every day at lunchtime and in the evening. Paradoxically, the lack of piped water makes the cholera risk a tiny bit lower. "There's no sewage," she says delicately. Residents have long found their own "solutions" to human waste disposal -- pit latrines etc. The real problem comes in the parts of the township where there is occasionally running water. Then people flush the loos but the sewerage pipes are overloaded so they burst and flood. Mix that with no rubbish collection, no schools (kids playing outside in the flooded streets), poor immune systems and what do you get? Cholera.

"You know in our area now you're not even allowed to hold funerals now," she says. "You have to tell the police when someone's died, their officials come, they wrap the body in a blanket and then in plastic and the body is buried straight away.

"In our culture funerals should take three or four days. Everyone comes to your house. You eat and drink together. But the officials are saying that's how the cholera will spread."

Africa University is organising a bus on Friday to take Harare students back home, she says. "I can't wait."