The Bulawayo Island Hospice has been operating since 1982 and is one of the few medical facilities catering to Zimbabwe’s poor. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS
BULAWAYO, Jan 11 2013 (IPS) – It took Gily Ncube’s daughters two weeks to sell enough chickens to raise the 18 dollars needed to buy the morphine tablets their mother takes every four hours.
In a country where unemployment is estimated at 70 percent, 18 dollars for a bottle of 60 tablets of 10 milligrammes (mg) each is a steep price to pay, equivalent to about 18 loaves of bread.
But the small, rural family had no choice morphine is the onl…