NHWALI, Zimbabwe -- As the girls talk about their hunger, they giggle nervously, as girls often do when they talk about themselves. Their grades have plummeted. They fall asleep in class from exhaustion. Often, when they have nothing at all to eat, they don't even bother coming to school.

"Sometimes it's better to stay home than to come and collapse here," said Litsoanelo Moyo, a 19-year-old student at Nhwali secondary school.

Zimbabwe's worst food crisis in a decade has begun to take its toll in places like Nhwali, a village 430 miles southwest of Harare.

Many now eat only one small meal a day. The poorest are forced to beg for a handful of corn meal from their neighbors. Child malnutrition has more than doubled to 8 percent.

And teachers and students at the local schools worry about the damage this is doing to the education system.

Scavenging for food

At the beginning of the year, the school enrolled 450 students. More than 50 have dropped out for three reasons: Their families stole across the border to South Africa, they were forced to help scavenge for food or their parents could no longer afford the $2 in school fees, said Soneni Dube, the deputy headmaster.

Of the remaining students, about 50 are absent on any given day, up from one or two in normal times. Those that come are often too hungry to study.

One girl fainted in the middle of a class. Teachers gave her some food, but she dropped out a few days later.

This weekend, the schoolgirls talked of their dreams -- of being a nurse, a journalist, a flight attendant. But they were more fixated on their hunger.

"I used to be fat," laughs Itumeleng Mdlongwa, a petite 17-year-old girl.

It is noon on a weekend day and they have walked between one and six miles to school. Not one of them has anything more in her stomach than black tea.

6 million hungry

The girls used to eat two hearty meals a day of meat, corn mash and vegetables and a small lunch. Now, when they are lucky, they get two small meals of corn mash and the rabe or spinach they grow in small gardens in their yards. When the government trucks selling corn don't come for a while -- and they haven't been to Nhwali for months -- they get only one meal, sometimes just vegetables.

An estimated 6 million of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people are threatened by a hunger crisis caused by a terrible drought and the government's chaotic land reform program, which has badly wounded its agriculture-based economy, according to the World Food Program.

Nearly 7 million people in five other countries in southern Africa are also at risk of starvation.

WFP head James Morris, who is touring the region to inspect the crisis, appealed Friday for donor nations to increase their contributions to help head off a potential disaster in the region.

The agency, which is currently delivering 11,000 tons a month to Zimbabweans, hopes to increase that to 60,000 tons. They predict the situation will get much worse in the coming months.

Meanwhile, human rights groups accuse the government, which sells corn at the fixed price of less than $1 for an 110-pound bag, of refusing to sell grain to opposition supporters and making only sporadic deliveries to opposition strongholds.

The government denies its land reform policies are to blame for food shortages, saying drought is the sole cause. It also denies allegations that it is denying the opposition food.

When Morris arrived in Nhwali to inspect the distribution of WFP corn, an unprecedented seven government trucks filled with bags of corn for sale rolled up, the first time since July that even one truck has arrived to feed the 9,000 people in the area, deep in opposition territory.

Janet Siziba, a 73-year-old widow, waits in line with money she has borrowed from a neighbor to buy corn to feed herself, her grandson, his wife and their two children.

She and her grandson used to feed the family off the harvest from their tiny field and the earnings they made by making bricks for neighbors. But their field produced nothing this year, and no one has money to pay them for piecework.

So she begs door to door for small handfuls of grain and watches fearfully as her 1- and 4-year-old great grandchildren grow weaker.

Siziba says she has not even bothered to plow her tiny field for the upcoming planting season, for one central reason: "Where will I get the money to get the seed?"