Southern Africa is currently experiencing one of the worst droughts in living memory. Almost 70 million people are without sufficient food and water.

In the Mudzi district of northern Zimbabwe, a community has gathered with their cattle in a bone-dry riverbed. The Vombozi normally flows all year round, but at the moment it is nothing but beige sand as far as the eye can see.

Armed with shovels and buckets, the men dig up the riverbed, desperately trying to get out every last drop of water.

In other parts of the district, rivers and dams have dried up, causing more and more people to flock to this riverbed in Kurima village, putting a strain on the water source.

There are several holes along the riverbed that are large enough to hold a single bucket.

Children bathe, women wash clothes and give water to their bellowing cattle.

Among these women is Gracious Phiri, a mother of five. The 43-year-old told the BBC that she now has to travel further than usual and spends three hours every day fetching water.

Mrs Phiri lowers her bucket into the half-metre-wide hole and scoops up brown-coloured water. She worries that her family might become ill.

“As you can see, the cattle drink from the same pit as us. Their urine is right there… it’s not very healthy,” she says.

“I have never seen anything like this before.”

There is also a food shortage in Zimbabwe. 7.7 million people are affected by hunger. In Mudzi, the number of families with access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food has fallen by more than half compared to previous years, the local health authority said.

Children are particularly affected – since June, the number of hospital admissions of adolescents with moderate to severe malnutrition has doubled.

A village feeding program is designed to counteract the problem. Once a week, the women of the community gather and bring all the products they have to prepare porridge for children under five years of age.

Ground baobab fruit, peanut butter, milk and Green leafy vegetables are added to the porridge for additional nutrients.

But the list of ingredients is getting shorter every week – black-eyed peas and beans were recently no longer available due to poor harvests.

The government, with support from partners such as the UN Children’s Fund Unicef, developed a village feeding program that was carried out at least three times a week.

“But because of the El Niño drought, we now only administer it once a week,” explains Kudzai Madamombe, the Mudzi district medical officer.

“Because of the lack of rain, we suffered a 100 percent crop failure,” he adds, saying the program may have to be suspended altogether next month as food supplies dwindle.

Clinics that provide vital medical care to Zimbabweans in Mudzi have also been affected – boreholes that supply water to a quarter of the clinics in the district have dried up, says Mr Madamombe.

And the district’s largest dam only has enough water for one month.

As a result, vegetable irrigation programs were suspended, including one that supported 200 local farmers.

The misery is omnipresent. Tambudzai Mahachi, 36, says she has grown hectares of maize, cowpeas and peanuts on her property.

For all her hard work she got nothing at all, not even a plate of food. Even her sturdy baobab tree barely bore any fruit.

In a good year, Mahachi said, she would normally supply the markets in the capital Harare, but now she is one of the millions of Zimbabweans who depend on alms.

Although the village feeding program provides food one day a week, their children must eat every day.

In a thatched hut, she cooks wheat to make breakfast for her two children. The wheat was delivered to her by a charitable neighbor.

“We went from eating what we want, when we want, to restricting our meals,” says Ms Mahachi.

“The older girl understands that sometimes there is only porridge. But sometimes I see that my youngest is hungry.”

There has been no rain in much of South Africa this year, on a continent where agriculture relies primarily on rainfall rather than irrigation for water.

Due to the drought, around a third of the countries in southern Africa have declared a state of disaster. Across the region, 68 million people are dependent on food aid.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) – a group of countries in the region – asked for $5.5 billion (£4 billion) in aid to combat the effects of the drought in May. So far only a small part of it has been received.

“Wherever you go in South Africa, families’ grain stores are empty and maize, the most consumed product in the region in terms of carbohydrates, is now too expensive for many people,” Tomson Phiri, spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) for South Africa, told the BBC.

“The situation will only get worse.”

The WFP has so far received only a fifth of the $400 million it needs for emergency aid, he says, adding that southern Africa is suffering from the largest maize deficit in 15 years.

And the hunger and water crisis has not yet reached its peak – October, the hottest and driest month of the year, is still a long way off.

If it rains in November or December, when the rainy season usually begins, farmers have to wait until March to harvest corn.

Mrs Mahachi is very aware of this as she breaks open some wild fruits to satisfy her hunger, unsure of what awaits her young family in the coming months.