to be that skinny, but without all the flies and death and stuff"- Mariah
Carey (Pop star and, clearly, deep thinker).
For those of us amidst all 'the flies and death and stuff' it has been a
busy week. The harvest in October was poor. I remember at the time everyone
told us it was poor, the problem is that this country has relied on food aid
for so long it is difficult to take predictions like this seriously. The
more wise (and possibly cynical) of our number have pointed out that, EVERY
harvest season is met with the same predictions from the tribal leaders, in
a (many would argue, not unreasonable) effort to boost the amount of food
dropped out of planes.
However, this harvest (which was in October) turns out to have been, what
the tabloid press would call, a bit of a shocker. The rains went on too long
and the crops were destroyed by an extraordinarily high number of birds
(no-one has provided a rational explanation as to why this was). Good
old-fashioned drizzle and a hefty dose of fighting earlier this year didn't
help either. We are now; in what is called in aid worker speak 'hunger-gap'.
This, as perhaps the name suggests, is when the food from the October
harvest runs out and the food that has been planted this year isn't ready
for consumption.
It also can't come as huge surprise, when I tell you that the first people
to suffer when the food starts running out are the kids. We run a feeding
program in our outreach clinics, which has seen a near quadrupling in
numbers in a month. In the base sites it's worse. Eighty children, all very
malnourished, and a program stretched to try and feed them, and this will go
on for months.
The workers in our clinics assess the children with complicated weight and
height measurements and give them a percentage against an internationally
agreed figure of what a child, in Africa, of that age and height should
weigh. Many just scrape in at half of their ideal weight. When the child has
reached eighty per cent of what they should be, they are discharged.
Feeding children sounds easy. Bring food, give to malnourished children, and
go home. Sadly life is rarely that simple. For example, as discussed before,
parents here don't bring their children to the clinic because they worry
about their weight. They bring them because of the associated with
malnutrition, namely coughs, diarrhoea etc. So if they didn't know they were
malnourished in the first place, it's pretty hard to convince them to keep
coming back to the clinic to collect supplementary food when they have no
concept of when their children are better. Hence they come sporadically and
in many cases don't come when there are other problems at home, such as
other children being sick, having crops to plant. . I did remark that we
should scrap the whole idea of discharge criteria and just have the sentence
'the child is discharged when the mother thinks they are better.'
This sounds heartless to a western reader, but when you have a whole family
to support one sick child sometimes has to take a back seat
There is also the problem of misuse, the food can end up feeding the whole
family, poorly, or worse, ends up on the market. Consequently the sickest
children are admitted to the program and are fed for a few weeks, put on a
bit of weight, are then taken home, only to lose the weight again and end up
back in the feeding program. It becomes a depressingly never-ending cycle.
During the liberation of Netherlands in the Second World War, there was and
area that was left without food for six weeks. Nutritionists were able to
show that after only six weeks of hunger women were more likely to miscarry,
infant development and future academic achievement was severely hampered. In
short, just a six-week break in food supply can have far reaching
ramifications. Here malnutrition has been going on for generations, if you
follow the argument the damage here must be thousands of times worse. 'When
I see those poor people in Africa, I just want to cry'. So do I Mariah, so
do I.
