'When you hold a dying child in your arms, politics does not come into it'

In an isolated village, some 100km west of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, I pick up a small girl called Helger. Her eyes are huge and appealing, and her small fist curls around my fingers with the strength of a clinging vine. She is nearly three years old, but looks barely two, weighs little more than a couple of bags of sugar, and when I put her down, I have to sit her carefully on the floor because her frail little bent legs will not carry the weight of her body.

Helger has Aids, as does her four-year-old brother, Lawrence, who sits mute and listless among the scraggy chickens scratching hopefully in the sand around him. His legs and arms are covered in open sores, and on the rare occasions when he does stand to walk, he falters with each step, the pain and effort etched on his innocent young face. Their mother died of Aids at the end of last year. Their father is also dying of the disease, along with his younger brother, his brother's wife, and their tiny 18-month-old baby daughter, Bridget. Six members of one family, all condemned by the virus that is sweeping across southern Africa, with only the 54-year-old grandmother, Agnes, left to feed and care for her sons and malnourished grandchildren.

They have no income, and are just too weak, or too young, to work their own land and grow even the most basic of foods for themselves. When I met them at 4pm, they had not eaten since the previous evening, and then only because neighbours had been shared some of their own meagre supplies to give them the equivalent of a small handful of porridge each. The stark reality is that if the virus does not kill them, starvation will. And soon.

But that is not the end of the story. In a country where it is thought that up to 42 per cent of the adult working population is HIV positive, it is not even particularly rare.

I have just returned from a three-day trip to Zimbabwe on a fact-finding mission for the British Red Cross, and I have seen for myself a crisis on an apocalyptic scale – famine, plague and death – in the eyes of sick and starving children such as Helger, the withered bodies of old women, and the living corpse of a soldier consumed by Aids, who is by now almost certainly dead.

We have been hearing for months that the country, indeed the whole of southern Africa, is on the verge of a famine. But second-hand stories from 6,000 miles away can't compare with first-hand experience. And that is exactly what I was given, in situations that moved me to tears, and left me at times feeling both angry and helpless when faced with a crisis that need never have happened, but which now needs major humanitarian aid to save at least some of the population.

What makes Helger's situation, and that of millions like her, so desperate, is a vicious cocktail of climatic, economic and political factors that have brought the country to the brink of a famine that threatens to be as catastrophic as the one that hit Ethiopia in the mid-1980s.

In Harare, it is easy to look around at the prosperous architectural façades of the banks and multinationals, dodge the shiny new Mercedes and BMWs, eat in the fashionable, well-stocked restaurants and say: "What famine? What disaster?" Like most large cities anywhere in the world, it is cosseted and protected from the harsh realities that can devastate a rural community long before they start nibbling away at the urban boundaries.

It is out in the country that people are already starving, where children have dropped dead at their school desks, weak and malnourished. A Red Cross volunteer tells me that three pupils have died recently from starvation in her area.

The drought has lasted for the past three years; the soil is now so dry that it is like sand, and the maize crop, the staple food for the population, stands parched and withered in the fields.

Zimbabwe has less than a quarter of the food it needs to feed its population of 13 million. The political upheavals of the past few years have left many productive farms wasted or so badly run that virtually no cash crop of tobacco or coffee has been harvested to provide the state with funds to buy essential food from other countries.

As the shortages start to bite, the prices of basic foods, such as cooking oil, cereal and vegetables, have risen by up to 400 per cent, to way beyond anything that the poor could ever afford when their basic wage is barely 60p per family, per day.

Aid agencies in the region, including the Zimbabwean Red Cross, are preparing for a major disaster in which they estimate that more than 5 million people will starve. Those already weakened by disease will be the first to succumb to the cold nights and gradual starvation. Not far behind them, the elderly and the young will pass from vulnerable to hopeless as the shortages become critical.

Coming face to face with death, as I did in a home close to Harare, is both shocking and humbling. In a room smaller than the average British family garage,, a man lay in a bed that took up almost two-thirds of the space. A former soldier,, he was in the final stages of the disease, his body shrunken with a thin covering of dehydrated skin over his skeleton. His eyes were closed and I thought he was already dead.

His wife, herself HIV positive (contracted from unprotected sex with her husband), has to nurse him 24 hours a day. They have no drugs or pain-killers – the cost and lack of availability make access to medicine impossible – just the daily visit from a Red Cross care worker who helps to move him to contain the bed sores, change his catheter, and bathe him.

Godfrey and Sophia have five children and also look after two orphans, the children of Godfrey's dead sister. At night, the children sleep on the floor, covered with pitifully thin blankets. As the wife described their situation to me, she gently moved her husband's exposed arm back beneath his blanket. Pain shot through his body, and although he did not make any sound, his lips bared, showing his teeth in a grimace of agony. And we could do nothing for him.

We left a basket of food, just basic provisions: 20 kilos of mealie meal, some dried fish, peanut butter, beans and cooking oil. The whole hamper cost £2.50 – but it was life and death to that family, as it was to each of the families we visited.

Take Musiiwa, a little boy of 13 with Aids, who has his open wounds smeared with Vaseline and chicken droppings (a remedy from the travelling herbal medicine man) because no other drugs are available for him. Musiiwa has not been to school for three months because he is too sick. His father died of Aids before he was born and his mother died five years ago from the disease.

Then there's the 85-year-old grandmother who has been left with four small grandchildren to raise after her son and daughter-in-law died.

And the 14-year-old boy who is now head of the family of four brothers and sisters because no relatives were either available or fit enough to take them on. The shed where they lived was small, dark and filthy, but the walls reflected their youth and optimism. Magazine photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, and David Beckham were pinned above the pile of dirty rags that served as bedding.

While the Red Cross volunteers do their best to make a difference, they admit they are facing a tidal wave of apathy and ignorance. But what is key to the operation is that the structure through which they work is respected, sanctioned by the government, and effective. And that means it is Zimbabwe's one hope for survival. Any food aid going into the country via the Red Cross really will reach the most vulnerable. It will support their Zimbabwean colleagues and channel food and aid through the existing Home Based Care Programme with its trained and dedicated volunteers.

Now I know that in the light of political events over the past two years, many will say: "No way. Why should we help that country?" But the Red Cross, as a non-political aid agency, takes the humanitarian line which says: "Millions of people are going to starve, and we just can't stand by and let that happen."

Hold a sick and dying child in your arms, as I did, and you will know all she wants is love, food, and a chance to live. Frankly, politics does not come into it.

The British Red Cross is part of the Disasters Emergency Committee which launched a Southern Africa Food Crisis Appeal last week. To help, please call 0870 606 0900 or visit www.dec.org.uk The fee for this article has been donated to the appeal.