Someone clipped out a newspaper article on Mali for me. Apparently there's a famine raging across the Sahel region of Africa, which my village is smack-dab in the middle of. It's not often you can read something in the newspaper about the sufferings of an impoverished nation, look up at your concerned Canadian friend, and say "Don't worry, I was just there. Everything's fine."
The graph on this thing's kind of weird, too. They highlight the effected areas on a map. It covers parts of eight countries. On their list of effected countries, though, there is still eight, but not every one is the same as the ones they've highlighted.
I've written about the different seasons of Mali? Originally, I thought the fluctuation wouldn't be too severe, because it's so close to the equator, but I was wrong. There's three seasons: wet season, cold season, and hot season. We came in at the tail end of wet season, and moved into cold season. In wet season, it was rainy, humid, and hot all the time. In cold season it never rained, and was frigid cold at night. You know how you sometimes here that in the desert, it's hot during the day and freezing at night? Yeah, well that's only true depending on season. For some reason the night temperatures fluctuate way more severely than daytime temperature.
We only got the tail end of rain season, but I'm told that during the thick of the season, it just never stops raining. I never saw rice growing, but we had tons and tons and tons of the stuff. I'm pretty sure that's because it only grows in rain season. You know how it's commonly cultivated during tsunamis? Well, I think they grow it during their African tsunami during cold season, and since it preserves well, they stock up and eat it throughout the year.
Anyway, the relevant time for collecting water this year is through, and based on what I saw, it doesn't seem like they're going to be stretched thin this year. You would be shocked at how freely they use their water. They shower three times a day, they clean themselves every time they pray (which, for Muslims, is five times), and before and after they eat.
I find it interesting, too, that this article refers to us as being the "world's donor nations", and it talks about how we neglected to step up during the last famine that hit this region.
Early after I got back, I was speaking on the difficulties I was having readapting to Canadian society, and somebody asked me if I felt guilty, because we have so much, and they had so little.
And it was funny, because, before the program I would have said yes, but after the program... no.
Thing is, you hear statistics like "We have enough food in the world to give every family five meals a day. The problem is distribution." and the implication always feels like, everything I take, is being taken from hungry, impoverished families. The perception is that there's some big stockpile of resources, and everyone should get a share, but some bigger, tougher guys are batting down the runts and taking more than their share. You feel like you're responsible to make sure everyone gets what's entitled to them.
Thing is, when you're living in a subsistence community... You grow food, and you eat it. You build using material from the earth. The land was here before first world societies developed, and now that they have, nothing's changed. Nobody's come and taken anything from you. The people from the big cities probably feel way more sore toward first world nations, because they're part of the globalization thing.
That being said, I'm probably more likely to donate now than I was before, but that's because I care personally about the people of Africa, not because of any feelings of obligation.
They also say that right now, it costs $80 to cure a malnourished child, whereas if they'd acted proactively, it would only cost $1. That's another thing. In these campaigns, everyone talks about money, but like I said above, with the growing food and material from the earth stuff... they don't really use money.
They're talking about feeding all 500,000 of the starving African children... Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee you nobody's going to show up in my village.
It says that over a million children will suffer from malnourishment in the Sahel crisis. Thing is, if there wasn't a famine, over a million children would suffer from malnourishment. Being malnourished isn't the same as starving. It's not a matter of how much you eat, but what you eat, and what you eat never changes around there.
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The problem with food isn't really distribution, either, or we wouldn't have starving people in first-world countries. I think the biggest problem is that enough people in power believe that everyone should have to work for subsistence, so rather than making sure that there is enough for everyone, they withhold food (by allowing most of it to be distributed through normal economic practices). It's rather an interesting position, given that many of the people who believe that down here are also people who seem to believe in documents as written (literal interpretation of the Constitution) ... I suppose the part about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being inalienable rights is something they skip over.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there are certainly side effects to providing food for first-world people, but then I wonder how much time, money, and effort is expended taking care of people who don't have enough to eat and suffer physical and emotional consequences ...
I like your points about famine and your experience in Mali. I think the idea behind donating money is that the money would go to the organizations providing food (they would spend your money, that is). I'm not sure curing malnutrition is as easy as they make it sound, though.
I seem to remember reading a study about improving nutrition in Southeast Asia, like Thailand maybe. (I'm sure I'm not remembering this well.) The group that was doing this went in with good intentions, showed the mothers how to improve the nutrition of their kids, and then left. When they returned, their methods were basically forgotten, because they hadn't worked to integrate them with local practices.
As it turns out, I remembered enough to use Google to find what I was thinking of, Community-Based Nutrition Programs. (Link is to a PDF describing the Thailand program.) To get the methods to stick, they had to show people in the community how to teach these methods to others. Once they had enough women in the community understanding and sharing the methods, they were able to make a lasting difference.
What made me think of that is this thought: if a group came in to Mali and said here are some vitamins, take these, you need them, that would probably last only as long as that group was there, and even then, it would be done with suspicion, much as if someone marched into one of our communities and did the same thing. To address the issue, they'd have to work with Malians to find ways they could naturally improve their nutrition, and the Malians would have to be the ones leading the change.
That's not how most groups work, because it's hard, and it requires person-to-person contact. It's easier to throw money at the problem and assume it'll be solved that way.
Yeah, that's really true, actually. I avoid touching on the negative bits of my Malian trip, but there was definitely some tension between the Malians and Canadians, when the Canadians attempted to "Make a change and show leadership" in their society by imposing Canadian ethics. Wasn't an issue with me, but there were some people that the Malians resented because of this.
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