FAMINE is a word that brings up images of biblical scenes involving locusts and first sons as well as little African babies (from the country of Africa) with scrappy clothes and fly covered faces. Before coming to first Mali and then Burkina Faso in West Africa with the Peace Corps, I imagined that hungry babies would haunt my dreams; that people would just be miserably hungry all the time. As it turns out, those scrappy clothes are a point of practicality on the part of parents who do not want to change their children's clothes fifteen times a day for no reason (an advancement over some germaphobe American parents I've seen). I can attest to the fact that it is HARD to stay clean here, impossible if you are a drooly two year old who thinks dirt is the most brillant food item since breast milk. And those flies harass everyone, regardless of race, creed, gender, nationality, or hunger level and everyone gets sick of batting them away at some point. I don't mean to imply that there are not malnourished kids here--that's part of my job--but like most illnesses and diseases, it probably doesn't look or work like you think it would.
Thus, I have become somewhat desensitized to the intensity of the hunt for food here in West Africa. I sort of forgot about this word Famine until my French tutor, Mr. Dakio, brought it up last Satuday during our lesson. He'd prepared a little comprehension paragraph, which I read aloud, fumbling over the words and trying to dig out the meaning. At the end, he asked me very seriously "Have you ever seen a famine?""Nooo," I replied hesitatingly, "but I almost did before I left Mali," as if it were a CBS special I intended to watch but missed due to another engagement. "Have you?,"I asked, mentally preparing for the deluge that was always Mr. Dakio's long-winded response to questions, wondering what he would think of grocery stores.. He told me that the first famine he experienced happened in the 60s, when he was still a kid. That year the rains didn't start in May or June like they usually do after the hot, dry season that proceeds them (the hot season, incidentally, being the beginnings of the hurricanes that later tear across North America). All the way to October, they barely managed to squeeze out a few drops, choking even the drought-resistant millet and sorghum. The functionaires (government employees whose salaries, though still pretty measily, by far surmount what most villagers make in 20 years), including Mr. Dakio's family, simply bought grain to make to, the grain blobs everyone eats here. He told me that for kilometers around the village, not a green leaf could be found. People ate leaves they'd never looked twice at before, boiling it two and three times to get rid of the bitter taste. Some people eat clay, just to fill their bellies. The elderly passed away quickly, as only a day or two with no food was more than an already frail body could handle. The protestant church came to the Upper Volta, as it was not yet Burkina Faso, with bags of red sorghum, the stuff we (Americans) usually use as animal feed. This was available in tiny amounts for huge families, offered with the stipulation that the family would join the church (being catholic didn't count). This red sorghum became famous and the words American and Protestant were tied with it. To this day, when Burkinabe find out that I am American and not French, they are almost instantly friendly and pour out doting words on Americans. People tried for a while to keep to local beliefs, sacrificing animals, dances, masks, even some particularly devout who ran around to all the old places of worship naked, arms flailing--the whole shebang. Unfortunately, this method didn't seem to work and many soon switched to Christianity, not surprisingly.
This place is always just a harvest away from famine. It's like living month to month with your paycheck, versus having a sound savings that could stand sometime of no income. I think at worst in America we could live on spam and twinkies, which are sure to survive a nuclear fallout, for at least a year or two. When I try to think of why these two countries are so different and really think about what the problem is, my thoughts start running at a hundred miles an hour and I come to 10 minutes later with a sigh, pulling on the uneven parts of my hair and staring at the wall. It's not called a "developing country" for no reason--infrastructure (roads, buildings, water pumps, storage, factories, public bathrooms, transportation), education (an old system of memorization, catered to boys, poorly managed and run, the idea of savings and investment), illness/disease (malaria, meningitis, and diarrhea are rampant and misunderstood, poor and distant medical facilities, lasting effects of childhood illness, vaccinations, free medicines that exacerbate problems like HIV as people seem asymptomatic, unwanted pregnancies, the list goes on) and the job market/economy (no real buyers, instability <coups happen!>, no jobs for even the educated, economy worldwide) for starters. All of these factors line up like dominoes, both individually and nationally, and with no external forces they seem good enough, their fragility forgotten. But one little push, one little breeze, and one breaks on another, wreaking havoc and starting everything back on square one....again. Say what you will about America's imperfect system, but I don't think our economic brinks even comes close to the one Burkina Faso has been tip-toeing for a while. Throwing money at these big problems, as a lot of development has been doing for some time, is also clearly not working. Throwing money at Africa, as far as I can see, has only made things worse! Just asking for some jerk to gobble it all up for motorcycles, fancy cars, and mad parties. A lot of villages and people here are also now spoiled for money and especially projects, a word that makes most people here's eyes sparkle as if it is a free present--which it has been. Not a simple problem, not a simple solution.
