Waiting for Healing: The Quiet Crisis at Parirenyatwa Radiotherapy Centre

Every morning, before Harare has woken up, there is already a line forming.

Not a short or orderly queue that moves with predictable rhythm. No, a long, patient, aching line of people who have nowhere else to go.

I drop off my relative there each weekday at the Radiotherapy Centre at Parirenyatwa Hospital. He is battling a brain tumor. That alone is a heavy sentence to carry. But it is not the only burden he carries.

Because before treatment comes waiting.

And before waiting comes arriving early enough to have a chance.

The Queue That Starts at Midnight

There are two queues.

One for those who can pay or who have been marked as priority. And one for everyone else. Both queues are unpredictable. You can wait for hours on any unsuspecting day.

By midnight, people are already gathering. They sit or lie down holding their place in a tent outside the centre. Names are written down and some have made a business of queueing for others. Many have travelled from outside the capital city. From towns and rural areas where radiotherapy is not available. They come with small bags, quiet determination, and the kind of fatigue that comes from deeper than missing a night's sleep.

They come because this is the only place they can come.

And so they wait.

The Indignity of Illness

Cancer is already a stripping experience.

It takes away certainty. It takes away strength. Forget about control.

But here, it also takes away dignity.

There is something profoundly unsettling about watching people, already facing life-altering diagnoses and now having to sit for hours, sometimes days, in conditions that feel improvised at best.

No one says it out loud, but the question hangs in the air:

Why must the fight for life begin with a fight for a place in a queue?

Caregivers in Suspension

Behind every patient is someone else waiting too.

Caregivers. These can be spouses, siblings, children. They have rearranged their lives around uncertainty. Work is paused. Plans are postponed. Energy is redirected entirely toward survival…not just of the patient, but of the system they must now navigate.

Patience becomes a discipline. Helplessness becomes a daily companion.

And still, they show up.

One Machine, Many Lives

At the centre of it all is a machine.

A single radiotherapy machine… serving an entire nation.

And like many things stretched beyond capacity, it breaks down.

Sometimes it stops working because of something as basic and as fixable as a water-related issue. You hear rumours of it over heating or boiling over. When it stops, everything stops. The queue does not disappear, it deepens. Faces in the queue sigh in frustration.

Hope, in these moments, becomes fragile.

The Human Cost Behind the System

It would be easy to place blame but the truth is more complex. The staff at the centre are not indifferent they are simply overwhelmed.

Every day, they face a crowd that reflects the scale of the problem far larger than the resources available to address it. They work within constraints they did not design, making impossible decisions in real time.

This is not a story of individuals failing.

It is a story of a system stretched thin.

A Public Health Question We Cannot Avoid

As a public health practitioner, I find myself asking questions that feel both urgent and unanswered:

- How are we deciding where funding goes?
- What does prioritization look like when it leaves people waiting overnight for essential care?
- How does a country with knowledge, expertise, and human capital still struggle to provide basic cancer treatment infrastructure?

These are not abstract questions.

They are lived realities visible every morning in that queue.

More Than a Queue

That line outside the Radiotherapy Centre is not just a queue.

It is a reflection of gaps in investment, delayed decisions and a healthcare system carrying more than it was built to hold.

But it is also a reflection of something else…something quieter, but just as powerful.

Resilience.

Because despite everything - the waiting, the uncertainty, the indignity - people still come. They still hope. They still believe that treatment, however delayed, is worth holding on for.

A Call That Cannot Be Ignored

There is no simple fix.

But there are clear starting points.

Dignity should not be a luxury in healthcare.
Access should not depend on endurance.
And cancer care should not hinge on a single machine.

This is not just about infrastructure… it is about values.

Because how a system treats its most vulnerable is not a side issue.

It is the measure.