Desperate measures in Zimbabwe

Many Zimbabweans are turning to the Vapostori religious sect

With 90% of the country's 11.8m people living on less than $1 a day, Zimbabweans are trying to deal with extreme poverty in a number of desperate ways.

For two million people, the answer over the past four years has been emigration, either the road to Harare International Airport, or to the Beitbridge border post with South Africa.

Along the route, prostitution flourishes, despite the threat posed by HIV/Aids. Starving women sell their bodies for the deposit on a cool drink bottle: U$14cents.

Meanwhile roughly 500,000 former employees of evicted white farmers are fending for themselves as hand-to-mouth goldpanners, vendors of stolen firewood and odd-job-men.

Turning to religion

A spirit of war-weariness is settling upon the country once called "the bread basket of Africa."

National output and foreign currency earnings have crashed, and inflation has hit 600%. Economists talk of "200% unemployment".

Less than a million people have formal sector jobs. The National Council for the Welfare of Children estimates there are at least 5,000 children living on the streets of the capital alone.

In desperation, some are turning to the Vapostori, or apostles, a religious sect which practice a mixture of Christianity and veneration of ancestors.

A seven-year old prophetess, Tespy, who says she is "the third voice of Jesus," was once followed by 2,000 people on a donkey cart pilgrimage from Guruve on the Zambezi Escarpment to Mazowe, 30km north of the capital.

"Blacks, coloureds, whites, Muslims and born-again Christians - they all come," Barbara Thomson, an Irish-born widow who has lived in Zimbabwe for 45 years and says she is "consulted" by four or five people a day, told BBC World Service's Focus on Africa magazine.