plump

Gibson is 5. "I'm five too," my son says, pricking up his ears. I've brought him along to the clinic where I'm observing a feeding scheme with Plumpynut, a supplement made of peanut butter, milk powder, oil and vitamins. (There's no power at home. No food either, but that's another story).

I look from Gibson to my own child. The difference is painful. Gibson is half the size of my child. He sits quietly on his mother's knee, while mine sits chunkily on the stone floor, drawing spaceships on a torn-out page of reporters' notebook.

"What's that?" he asks a little bit too eagerly, as a nurse counts out 28 silver sachets of Plumpynut. Gibsons's mother -- we've exchanged sympathetic smiles over the kids' heads --packs it carefully away in an empty maize-meal bag. Four a day for seven days. She'll be back next Monday to get more.

Gibson drank poison while he was young. It's a common enough tale in some townships, where people live close together and there's little storage space. Fertiliser or rat poison, those are the usual ones.

"He's got strictures in his oesophagus," the nurse says quietly. "Before, he could only have milk but this Plumpynut, he can digest it too."

Gibson starts to cry as his mother gets up. She hands him a sachet and he tears at the corner greedily.

Later, I send my child outside while I watch in silence a small boy with flesh hanging off his buttocks being weighed. The nurses insist on stripping the children naked to weigh them.

Guiltily, I lug my huge child home.