Food Aid Funny Business

At the end of each month, the time comes to distribute the grain earned by people participating in Danja’s Food Aid project (which has recently been featuring here on SIM UK’s homepage.)

Food aid, as we’ve mentioned before, is a simple method of distributing food to those genuinely in need. A person joins the program, takes part in a short piece of work, and receives payment in the form of a sack of grain.

Recently, we had an army of ladies spring up on the edge of our housing compound, as they made their way across a stretch of unused ground, digging and preparing it for sowing. Spirits seemed to generally be quite enthusiastic, and each of these women will no doubt be happy to receive their grain.

Very occasionally, someone might come to our house asking for charity. The food aid program is a good way of managing this need, and it was comforting to recently see a lady who had come to us taking part and having the dignity of earning her keep, rather than having to rely on begging.

Of course, not everyone is able to work. The grain distribution is also given freely to patients who are recovering from leprosy and their families, and to a selection of other’s identified by administrators. Supporting these patients remains a cornerstone of Danja’s work.

Last time around, Peter couldn’t help but go down and watch as people began to gather to collect their grain. It was exciting to see such tangible results for a project.

People gather to receive grain from the food aid program.

CSL workers begin to hand out some of the sacks.

More people gather as other begin to take their grain home.

Peter wasn’t the only one taking photos though – he was joined in the Danja ‘press pool’ by none other than Maradi’s No. 1 clown!

Maradi’s top clown brought his own gear for taking photographs…

…but he ended up being the subject!

The clown was entertaining the crowds with some slapstick pantomime, mucking around with an old Polaroid. He was pretty funny!

Rain Dance

The view out the window at Danja’s guesthouse – doesn’t quite communicate the wind!

And so, the rain dance begins. Not a literal dance, conjuring up images of some tribal stereotype – but a mental dance, back and forth.

After a half hour opening salvo last Friday night, the heavens opened at the start of the week. Thought rain was not expected to arrive properly for another few weeks, we were pounded first by dust and wind, and then lashed by a long deluge across the first half of the night. From one of the rooms in the guesthouse we had a grandstand view, and had great fun watching the water inch its way under the door…

Looking out the window, the wind howled, the water drenched, and the lightening lit up the surroundings for miles.

For dry-as-a-bone Niger, already heightened by the apparent onslaught of famine conditions, farmers are presented with a potentially life-or-death decision. The moment they think rainy season has come, and with it the promise of regular soakings for stretch of weeks, everything is put on hold and seed will be sown. Those essential crops are everything to many people: both food and income. Thus, the need to predict the start and length of rainy season is crucial.

The danger is false hope. What if it rains once, but it’s only a precursor to rainy season and not the guarantee of further precipitation? Resources will go to waste, parched on unforgiving, sandy ground.

We had a bit of a fridge problem this week as we moved in to our new home, and found ourselves ‘reduced’ to not-quite-cold water and not-quite-frozen meat. It’s easy to get wound up about this. But within walking distance in every direction, there are people who have to decide whether to stake their families’ livelihood on the decision to sow or not.

When we saw a flicker of lightening in the distance last night, we all began to wonder… but the wait goes on.

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The above was written on Friday afternoon – but I (Peter) didn’t get time to publish it. My typing was interrupted as, in the blink of an eye, a dust storm swept over the compound, reducing visibility to metres and blanketing us in sand. Knowing that this was almost certain to pre-empt more rain, we locked the office and fled to the houses. Shortly after, it began to rain for several hours.

Already, there are shoots of grass starting to appear all over Danja, and for the first time yesterday, I was greeted with the words, ‘How is the planting?’, replacing the by now expected ‘How is the heat?’ Farmers are hitting the fields hard – the sense that prayers have been answered is tangible.

And so, I think we will stick my neck out (though maybe not too far) and declare wet season well and truly HERE!

Food Crisis

Friday brings the due date for another blog post – I (Peter) have been trying to capture a flavour of our orientation trip a while back all week, but it’s now so long, it’s turning into a Greek epic. (Well, less swords…)

The food crisis is something that has brought Niger to the attention of folk back in the UK recently. Our point of view here is slightly different, in that you probably have better streams of information that we do on certain things. However, regardless of how severe the crisis may be, or what exactly the cause is (everything from the Mali situation to poor farming practices) we’ve recently seen evidence that it’s happening.

Generally, large swathes of Niger suffer a food shortage each year. Whether through poor rain, harvest or over-intensive farming, between March-September every year it seems the food just starts to run out. It’s more a question of how severe the shortages are that make the difference between a regular year and the critical ones. That in itself is miserable – people will die, but it has to reach a certain number before it’s a crisis or famine.

We recently spent a few days in Niamey, the capital, and the increase in impoverished folk coming in from the rural areas to beg was noticeable, as was the intensity of their desperation. In Galmi, which is, in comparions, reasonably well off in places thanks to the hospital and passing trade, one will walk down the street and children will occasionally run up and ask for a present. You smile and tell them to ‘have patience’, maybe fork over the odd butter candy, and they’ll run off happily.

Last weekend in Niamey, women and children were following people the length of streets begging. These weren’t boys out collecting for the local m*slim teacher, kitted out with their trademark metal bowl – these were lean, intense looking women earnestly pushing their kids forward with outstretched hands.

As we prepare to move to Danja, I recently had a conversation with the director there about the Danja Food Aid programme (which runs on a food-for-work principle.) We’re pleased that SIM UK have been publicising the project heavily recently, as a wonderful-sounding SIM retiree has undertaken fundraising for it. I asked him how donations to the project were going: inevitably, he replied, when Niger was in the news donations would go up, and so he hoped for help to come in this year; however, once the stories stop, the donations generally drop even though the need remains. A fairly typical story of charity, in a world with so many needs in so many places. It sounds like Danja is bracing itself a little for the needs to be met in the next few months.

Elsewhere in Niger, SIM are already involved in raising support for grain banks, and hopefully that too should help to relieve the strain.

The BBC published an interesting short photo diary to illustrate some aspects of the food shortages, which we’ve purloined straight from Deb’s blog, and would recommend if you have a moment to spare.

And so, regardless of the how’s and why’s, people are hungry and many may die. There’s a fatalistic viewpoint – that that’s just the way it is, or even that it’s God’s will – that we have to avoid. I (Peter again) often found that, on occasion in NI, charity fatigue can set in: it’s like people are always asking for more from us. But the thing we have to remember is that we are in an incredible position. If you have more than, say, two changes of clothes, you are already rich beyond the wildest dreams of many of those here. If you can choose what to eat tonight, you again are privileged. This isn’t to guilt us or make us feel like we’re under attack by worthy causes.

Rather, the realisation has to slowly dawn on us that we have the joyous position of being able to give, and to give in a way where so very little makes such a huge difference. It’s not a burden, it’s a right that we should claim. The right as those at the top to give those at the bottom some help. Not a handout. Not a freebie or a crutch. Just making it a little easier.