Summary

Chapter 1 opens onto a scene of distress. The narrator, an eight-year-old girl named Elizabeth Nyamayaro, is starving to death. She has had no food or drink for three days. She is growing weaker and is all alone under a large tree in a barren field. She is too tired to be truly frightened. Zimbabwe is experiencing a disastrous drought, and she can hardly remember the feasts of goat stew that she cooked with her gogo (grandmother) when times were better. Before the relentless drought, Nyamayaro and her gogo lived very simply, but all of their needs were met. Food belonged to the whole village, so if she or her gogo needed something in particular, they had only to ask for it or perhaps trade her gogo's beautiful sweet pumpkins for the missing ingredient. Now the rains have not come for two years...