Malawi's rural poor don't know much
about the science of climate change but they know the effect it is having on
their lives: a slow slide deeper into poverty marked by heat, hunger and HIV.

Across the country, farmers tell tales
of once fertile soil that now yields very little. They speak of rains that
either don't come on time or arrive as floods. Rivers once rich in fish are now
too shallow and hot to provide valuable sources of protein.

In Balaka, in the south of the southern
African country, elders notice the changes most.

Manesi David doesn't know how old
she is, but her hair is silver beneath her headscarf, her eyes are rheumy and
grown men call her Gogo, a local term for grandmother.

'For the past six years I have noticed
this change in the weather, she said. 'I'm not sure what this climate change
is but I know the rains have changed. Now hunger is something we have every
year.

Burnett Chambulika, the headman of the village, reads a newspaper whenever he can afford one
and listens to the radio avidly.

'Many factories overseas use coal
and they have destroyed nature because they put fumes into the atmosphere. Now
the seas that were covered in ice have ships moving through them. That shows
how things have really changed, he said. 'Most of our mountains no longer have
trees on them because we have cut them down. But now things are spoilt and we
have to live with it. We need to think deeper. Generations are still coming and
what will they have? There won't even be trees for firewood or for building
houses.

Tereza Makowa, 45, who lives near a
major trucking route, worries that women are being driven by hunger to sell
sex.

'Poverty and HIV are the same thing,
she said. 'Most women don't have anything else to sell, so they sell sex. Women
are the worst affected because we have the responsibility to take care of our
children and husbands and make sure they have food. A man can take the money
and go out and drink and eat wherever they like but a woman cannot do that. She
must feed her children."