Dear friends, I have almost made it through the first 3 months at site, as IST starts Monday. I am really looking forward to IST, being in Thies again (electricity and running water!), seeing the Vols from my Stage, and getting away from the village for the intense August rains. I am hoping to head out of the village Thursday and spend a few days in Kaolack (to do some work pre-IST) before hopefully heading up to Thies on Saturday; though it may be Sunday, depending on what my fellow Vols in Klack want to do. Tomorrow I will be hosting my first "formation" in the village, teaching a small group of women how to make Neem Lotion, a natural mosquito repellant made from the leaves of the Neem Tree. Hopefully it will go well (think good Serere thoughts for me please) and people will use it. I already know of two women (one of my sisters, a young mother of at least 5 or 6 kids, and another friend in the village, mother of her own army of children) in my village with probable Malaria, but they cant or wont go to the Health Post, luch against my protests and insisting someone take them. However, money is low, the Post is far away, and most of the charrets are in the field. Its crazy scary and frustrating that they cant go to the HPost, esp since Malaria cases are only going to rise from here on out.
I just picked up a few more packages/letters from the Post Office. I guess some others are on their way, but will have to wait until the end of August for me to pick them up. Thank you all very much, I am very excited and it means a lot to know people are thinking and carring about me. I love you all and my next post will either be from Thies or Kaolack, depending.
mardi 29 juillet 2008
lundi 21 juillet 2008
Quick Q
For those of you who are tech inclined, how does one get blog updates emailed to you? I want to do what I can to stay on top of fellow PCVs and friends' blogs, but cant figure out if its w Google Reader or otherwise.
Sorry for this pathetic post, I had one about the great guests I had last weekend, but Internet Explorer freaked out. Annoying.
Sorry for this pathetic post, I had one about the great guests I had last weekend, but Internet Explorer freaked out. Annoying.
Oh yea, I actually have a job here...
Hey Friends. Once again in dirty, annoying Kaolack.
So I’ve come to the realization that my blog mostly shares the horrors and ridiculousness of my Service thus far, so maybe I should actually share a little about my job and what I’ve been doing (or should be doing) with these first few months at site (and honestly, the first few months following IST which starts in just two weeks). This has been spurred by reading fellow Vols blogs and remembering, “hey, I’m actually here to do something, maybe people are interested in that too?” We shall see.
I came here for a meeting with my new APCD over the new direction of the Health Education program. The meeting was a good chance to sit down and talk about ideas for training and what we want the program to be, and while it was a tad frustrating, it was overall good. I think I went off a little over my own frustrations with some aspects of my assignment, but I think he has a better understanding of the importance of proper site selection and Volunteer placement for the future. [Note: there’s nothing wrong with my placement, I merely commented on the fact that the Nurse (one of my counterparts) doesn’t actually speak Serere nor really know much about the Peace Corps and if I wasn’t able to effectively communicate in French, it would have been a disastrous and ridiculous pair-up. I just really wanted to make sure that they know issues encountered for future groups.] It was also a good chance to share my desire to work more with the schools than the health posts as well.
Anyways, so as many of you may know, during these first three months at site, we aren’t really supposed to do much “real work,” like projects and such. Instead, we are supposed to focus on getting to know our villages (integrating), learning about the area, and learning the language. This is hard and also basically means a lot of sitting around, or wandering around, hoping someone wants to talk to you. It would be a lot easier if I was good at small talk and/or had a better grasp on Serere, which I do not. As part of learning about the area, we are supposed to ask a lot of questions, about everything from health to crops to families to education, etc. Health Volunteers have what is called a Community Health Survey to complete, by going house to house, or otherwise collecting a decently-sized sample of the community. It asks about things such as sanitation (Do you have a douche/toilet? Do you clean it?), maternal and child health (Do you give birth at home or at the Health Post? At what age do you begin weaning your child? With what foods?), basic illnesses (What are the most common diseases in your village?), food and nutrition (How often do you eat vegetables/meat/fish?), and water management (Where do you get your water? Where do you store it? What do you do with it before drinking? What do you do with dirty water?). It is basically an attempt to learn about the health practices of the village, not to mention work on the language and meet/hang out with people. After some procrastination (and language frustration, let’s be honest), I started conducting my survey with my counterpart. It basically involved me translating the questions from English to Serere, talking over them with him, and then him basically asking all of the questions very quickly as we went house to house, me understanding about 70% of what was said (and by 70%, probably 50%, lol). We’ve done it two different afternoons so far and will do at least two more afternoons together, then I may wander alone to the places we didn’t get, though I’m getting a pretty good idea of the answers, or at least what they are telling me. The reality and what they tell me though may be very different things. It’s interesting and eye-opening to say the least.
Sometimes I wonder if my counterpart was feeding people the answers, especially to the question, “Why do you want a Volonteer? What are the major health concerns of the village?” The answer to both of those is “We should have a health hut, with medicine, and maybe a communally shared charret to take people from the village to the Health Post in Djilor, esp for those who don’t have charrets or when the charrets are in the fields and people don’t have time to take away from the fields.” That, and “we should have a millet grinder because pounding millet is hard on the body.” (Note: we do have a millet grinder, but it hasn’t worked in over a month, for some unknown reason) Great, all anyone will tell me is that they want a health hut, a charret, and a millet-grinding machine. Good start, but those are not going to be easy things to tackle or even good places to start out in my work. We are supposed to come up with a plan of things to tackle in our communities, a combo of our own ideas and what the community wants and needs. I’ll add a health hut to the list, but the village also has other issues like hygiene, nutrition, and Malaria, not to mention training people in the village to run health education programs and work with the schools. I feel like my list of things to tackle grows on a weekly basis. Exciting but very overwhelming as I have no idea of where to start, esp with my current language level. O ndang o ndang (little by little).
Part of the difficulty though with starting the survey now (though I don’t really have much choice, IST starts in 2 weeks), is that everyone goes to the fields on a daily basis here in the Delta. The millet was planted over a month ago, so it’s now coming up, as are the weeds. That basically means that everyone except the really old, really young, or very pregnant (so the men, women, teens, kids), go to the fields from 7:30 until 6:30 or so, to weed, re-seed, and who knows what else. I’ve gone a few times, but don’t go everyday because, well, I have other stuff to do, both around my hut and in preparation for IST. It’s definitely weird being around though because it’s just the 4 really old people at my compound, a few of the babies (those under 4), and me, the crazy white girl who reads and writes a lot. And now that the teachers are gone, there’s no one else hanging around that’s not a farmer with fields and crops. It makes for a creepy and deserted feeling around the village during the late morning and afternoon. The women, of course, are the champions. They are up before sunrise pounding millet for breakfast (I heard my sister once around 5am), cook, do laundry, sweep, etc, then work in the fields, one or two come back to make lunch and take back out to the fields, work, come back around 5:30 or so, pound more millet, cook, bathe children, eat dinner, and then even after dinner, around 9pm or so, sit in the dark sifting millet for the following day’s meals—While the men rest. It’s kind of ridiculous, but they are definitely the champs, so strong and yet totally exhausted by the end of the day.
Here’s a common convo I now have on a daily basis, translated from Serere:
Person: You don’t go to the fields?
Me: Yes, I went yesterday but I didn’t go today.
Person: You have a field?
Me: No, I don’t have a field.
Person: You don’t have a field? (shock and disbelief) You can’t farm, can you?
Me: I can farm.
Person: You can farm?! (shock and disbelief again)
Me: Yes, I can farm, I can gnos (basically weed, with a spade-like tool).
Person: You can gnos?! (more shock and disbelief)
Me: Yes, I can gnos. (I walk toward them in the field, take their tool and start weeding) I can gnos, I have a gnosi (the thing you weed with)
Person: You have a gnosi?! (shock and disbelief) You can gnos! Oh Khady Diouf, haha
(I walk away, glad to have shown them that I can indeed gnos, even if I don’t have a field and am not actually a farmer)
However, I have only gnos-ed for a few hours at a time, whether in the field or in my backyard, and doubt my ability to spend 10 hours a day in the fields gnos-ing. The farmers (ie everyone here) are tough, but I guess, they have to be, their food supply for next year depends on it. This is subsistence farming, ladies and gentlemen, not the big corporate or otherwise subsidized farms of the US. There’s a food crisis and the people of the Delta are doing everything they can to keep food in their bellies. Makes you appreciate what we have, doesn’t it?
Other things to work on pre-IST while people are in the fields include maps of my village and what’s around as well as a map of what’s in town, lists of activities I’ve done to “help with my integration” (uh, I sit around in the day, and walk around the village in the late afternoon and greet people…I dance at baptisms, is that enough?), and a kind of analysis of the health situation in the village, done through the help of the Health Survey. We are supposed to write something up as well as do like a 15 minute presentation at IST…we’ll see how those go.
I’m going to go now that this post is ridiculously long and full of insanely long run-on sentences. Please don’t judge me J
So I’ve come to the realization that my blog mostly shares the horrors and ridiculousness of my Service thus far, so maybe I should actually share a little about my job and what I’ve been doing (or should be doing) with these first few months at site (and honestly, the first few months following IST which starts in just two weeks). This has been spurred by reading fellow Vols blogs and remembering, “hey, I’m actually here to do something, maybe people are interested in that too?” We shall see.
I came here for a meeting with my new APCD over the new direction of the Health Education program. The meeting was a good chance to sit down and talk about ideas for training and what we want the program to be, and while it was a tad frustrating, it was overall good. I think I went off a little over my own frustrations with some aspects of my assignment, but I think he has a better understanding of the importance of proper site selection and Volunteer placement for the future. [Note: there’s nothing wrong with my placement, I merely commented on the fact that the Nurse (one of my counterparts) doesn’t actually speak Serere nor really know much about the Peace Corps and if I wasn’t able to effectively communicate in French, it would have been a disastrous and ridiculous pair-up. I just really wanted to make sure that they know issues encountered for future groups.] It was also a good chance to share my desire to work more with the schools than the health posts as well.
Anyways, so as many of you may know, during these first three months at site, we aren’t really supposed to do much “real work,” like projects and such. Instead, we are supposed to focus on getting to know our villages (integrating), learning about the area, and learning the language. This is hard and also basically means a lot of sitting around, or wandering around, hoping someone wants to talk to you. It would be a lot easier if I was good at small talk and/or had a better grasp on Serere, which I do not. As part of learning about the area, we are supposed to ask a lot of questions, about everything from health to crops to families to education, etc. Health Volunteers have what is called a Community Health Survey to complete, by going house to house, or otherwise collecting a decently-sized sample of the community. It asks about things such as sanitation (Do you have a douche/toilet? Do you clean it?), maternal and child health (Do you give birth at home or at the Health Post? At what age do you begin weaning your child? With what foods?), basic illnesses (What are the most common diseases in your village?), food and nutrition (How often do you eat vegetables/meat/fish?), and water management (Where do you get your water? Where do you store it? What do you do with it before drinking? What do you do with dirty water?). It is basically an attempt to learn about the health practices of the village, not to mention work on the language and meet/hang out with people. After some procrastination (and language frustration, let’s be honest), I started conducting my survey with my counterpart. It basically involved me translating the questions from English to Serere, talking over them with him, and then him basically asking all of the questions very quickly as we went house to house, me understanding about 70% of what was said (and by 70%, probably 50%, lol). We’ve done it two different afternoons so far and will do at least two more afternoons together, then I may wander alone to the places we didn’t get, though I’m getting a pretty good idea of the answers, or at least what they are telling me. The reality and what they tell me though may be very different things. It’s interesting and eye-opening to say the least.
Sometimes I wonder if my counterpart was feeding people the answers, especially to the question, “Why do you want a Volonteer? What are the major health concerns of the village?” The answer to both of those is “We should have a health hut, with medicine, and maybe a communally shared charret to take people from the village to the Health Post in Djilor, esp for those who don’t have charrets or when the charrets are in the fields and people don’t have time to take away from the fields.” That, and “we should have a millet grinder because pounding millet is hard on the body.” (Note: we do have a millet grinder, but it hasn’t worked in over a month, for some unknown reason) Great, all anyone will tell me is that they want a health hut, a charret, and a millet-grinding machine. Good start, but those are not going to be easy things to tackle or even good places to start out in my work. We are supposed to come up with a plan of things to tackle in our communities, a combo of our own ideas and what the community wants and needs. I’ll add a health hut to the list, but the village also has other issues like hygiene, nutrition, and Malaria, not to mention training people in the village to run health education programs and work with the schools. I feel like my list of things to tackle grows on a weekly basis. Exciting but very overwhelming as I have no idea of where to start, esp with my current language level. O ndang o ndang (little by little).
Part of the difficulty though with starting the survey now (though I don’t really have much choice, IST starts in 2 weeks), is that everyone goes to the fields on a daily basis here in the Delta. The millet was planted over a month ago, so it’s now coming up, as are the weeds. That basically means that everyone except the really old, really young, or very pregnant (so the men, women, teens, kids), go to the fields from 7:30 until 6:30 or so, to weed, re-seed, and who knows what else. I’ve gone a few times, but don’t go everyday because, well, I have other stuff to do, both around my hut and in preparation for IST. It’s definitely weird being around though because it’s just the 4 really old people at my compound, a few of the babies (those under 4), and me, the crazy white girl who reads and writes a lot. And now that the teachers are gone, there’s no one else hanging around that’s not a farmer with fields and crops. It makes for a creepy and deserted feeling around the village during the late morning and afternoon. The women, of course, are the champions. They are up before sunrise pounding millet for breakfast (I heard my sister once around 5am), cook, do laundry, sweep, etc, then work in the fields, one or two come back to make lunch and take back out to the fields, work, come back around 5:30 or so, pound more millet, cook, bathe children, eat dinner, and then even after dinner, around 9pm or so, sit in the dark sifting millet for the following day’s meals—While the men rest. It’s kind of ridiculous, but they are definitely the champs, so strong and yet totally exhausted by the end of the day.
Here’s a common convo I now have on a daily basis, translated from Serere:
Person: You don’t go to the fields?
Me: Yes, I went yesterday but I didn’t go today.
Person: You have a field?
Me: No, I don’t have a field.
Person: You don’t have a field? (shock and disbelief) You can’t farm, can you?
Me: I can farm.
Person: You can farm?! (shock and disbelief again)
Me: Yes, I can farm, I can gnos (basically weed, with a spade-like tool).
Person: You can gnos?! (more shock and disbelief)
Me: Yes, I can gnos. (I walk toward them in the field, take their tool and start weeding) I can gnos, I have a gnosi (the thing you weed with)
Person: You have a gnosi?! (shock and disbelief) You can gnos! Oh Khady Diouf, haha
(I walk away, glad to have shown them that I can indeed gnos, even if I don’t have a field and am not actually a farmer)
However, I have only gnos-ed for a few hours at a time, whether in the field or in my backyard, and doubt my ability to spend 10 hours a day in the fields gnos-ing. The farmers (ie everyone here) are tough, but I guess, they have to be, their food supply for next year depends on it. This is subsistence farming, ladies and gentlemen, not the big corporate or otherwise subsidized farms of the US. There’s a food crisis and the people of the Delta are doing everything they can to keep food in their bellies. Makes you appreciate what we have, doesn’t it?
Other things to work on pre-IST while people are in the fields include maps of my village and what’s around as well as a map of what’s in town, lists of activities I’ve done to “help with my integration” (uh, I sit around in the day, and walk around the village in the late afternoon and greet people…I dance at baptisms, is that enough?), and a kind of analysis of the health situation in the village, done through the help of the Health Survey. We are supposed to write something up as well as do like a 15 minute presentation at IST…we’ll see how those go.
I’m going to go now that this post is ridiculously long and full of insanely long run-on sentences. Please don’t judge me J
mercredi 9 juillet 2008
Qucik Update
I am in Foundiougne and just picked up a bunch of padded envelopes and letters. My fellow Vols are quite jealous of all of my mlail, so I just wanted to send out a public Jookoonjal, or thank you very much for the mail. I cant wait to look at the letters and open the packages. You guys are amazing and I really appreciate it.
Nothing much else going on, except that one of my nearest Vols recently had a charret accident herself. We are convinced they are going to create an anti-charret policy or at least charret riding lessons during training just because of us. At least we are both fine after such adventures. Oh Senegal!
Nothing much else going on, except that one of my nearest Vols recently had a charret accident herself. We are convinced they are going to create an anti-charret policy or at least charret riding lessons during training just because of us. At least we are both fine after such adventures. Oh Senegal!
samedi 5 juillet 2008
Kaolack
There are many reasons I do not like Kaolack and if it were not for the electricity, internet, and availability of decent food, not to mention seeing other Volunteers, I probably would never come here. It is just not a pretty city and it smells bad, plus many pêople are just rude, as was illustrated a few weeks ago when a man driving a charret whipped me as I walked by or the kids always yelling "toubab" (white person). Thanks, I appreciated that.
Here is another experience:
Today, while purchasing veggies for my family in the crowded veggie part of the market, I was hit by a motorbike. Yep. I had just paid for 2kg of veggies (onions, cabbage, potato, carrots) and was reaching out for my purchase and BAM! I am in a woman's bucket of lettuce she was selling. I am thrown off and immediately get up as she starts yelling at me and turn to see what happen. There a man on a motorbike (moped) is standing, front wheel at my legs. I immediately reach for my purse, to make sure it wasnt a scam to snag my wallet (it wasnt, thankfully), but am in disbelief as this lady is yelling at me while trying to fix her display. I think she xwants me to buy all of the lettuce and I point at the moto guy and then EVERYONE in the area starts yelling at him in Wolof. LOVED it. I joined in, yelling in English, just to show my annoyance and so as not to come across as the Vulnerable Tourist or anything like that and he doesnt do much of anything, though people are yelling, or even apologize. I apologized in French to the Lettuce Lady and tried to get on my way. A woman farther off seemend concerned that I was dirty now from falling in the lettuce and lettuce water, but I continued on my way, mostly annoyed and in shock, but also thankful that nothing worse happened.
Just another anequedote on my life, not meant to worry anyone. I am FINE :)
Here is another experience:
Today, while purchasing veggies for my family in the crowded veggie part of the market, I was hit by a motorbike. Yep. I had just paid for 2kg of veggies (onions, cabbage, potato, carrots) and was reaching out for my purchase and BAM! I am in a woman's bucket of lettuce she was selling. I am thrown off and immediately get up as she starts yelling at me and turn to see what happen. There a man on a motorbike (moped) is standing, front wheel at my legs. I immediately reach for my purse, to make sure it wasnt a scam to snag my wallet (it wasnt, thankfully), but am in disbelief as this lady is yelling at me while trying to fix her display. I think she xwants me to buy all of the lettuce and I point at the moto guy and then EVERYONE in the area starts yelling at him in Wolof. LOVED it. I joined in, yelling in English, just to show my annoyance and so as not to come across as the Vulnerable Tourist or anything like that and he doesnt do much of anything, though people are yelling, or even apologize. I apologized in French to the Lettuce Lady and tried to get on my way. A woman farther off seemend concerned that I was dirty now from falling in the lettuce and lettuce water, but I continued on my way, mostly annoyed and in shock, but also thankful that nothing worse happened.
Just another anequedote on my life, not meant to worry anyone. I am FINE :)
Because this is a big deal
The silent tsunami
Apr 17th 2008From The Economist print edition
Food prices are causing misery and strife around the world. Radical solutions are needed
Getty Images
PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.
Today's pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil; even China is worried. Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.
Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.
Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past decade of growth. Because food markets are in turmoil, civil strife is growing; and because trade and openness itself could be undermined, the food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalisation.
First find $700m
Rich countries need to take the food problems as seriously as they take the credit crunch. Already bigwigs at the World Bank and the United Nations are calling for a “new deal” for food. Their clamour is justified. But getting the right kind of help is not so easy, partly because food is not a one-solution-fits-all problem and partly because some of the help needed now risks making matters worse in the long run.
The starting-point should be that rising food prices bear more heavily on some places than others. Food exporters, and countries where farmers are self-sufficient, or net sellers, benefit. Some countries—those in West Africa which import their staples, or Bangladesh, with its huge numbers of landless labourers—risk ruin and civil strife. Because of the severity there, the first step must be to mend the holes in the world's safety net. That means financing the World Food Programme properly. The WFP is the world's largest distributor of food aid and its most important barrier between hungry people and starvation. Like a $1-a-day family in a developing country, its purchasing power has been slashed by the rising cost of grain. Merely to distribute the same amount of food as last year, the WFP needs—and should get—an extra $700m.
And because the problems in many places are not like those of a traditional famine, the WFP should be allowed to broaden what it does. At the moment, it mostly buys grain and doles it out in areas where there is little or no food. That is necessary in famine-ravaged places, but it damages local markets. In most places there are no absolute shortages and the task is to lower domestic prices without doing too much harm to farmers. That is best done by distributing cash, not food—by supporting (sometimes inventing) social-protection programmes and food-for-work schemes for the poor. The agency can help here, though the main burden—tens of billions of dollars' worth—will be borne by developing-country governments and lending institutions in the West.
Such actions are palliatives. But the food crisis of 2008 has revealed market failures at every link of the food chain. Any “new deal” ought to try to address the long-term problems that are holding poor farmers back.
Then stop the distortions
In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.
For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.
There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should keep out of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual farmers to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce higher-yielding seeds. But be careful. Too often—as in Europe, where superstitious distrust of genetic modification is slowing take-up of the technology—governments hinder rather than help such advances. Since the way to feed the world is not to bring more land under cultivation, but to increase yields, science is crucial.
Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With luck and good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition from one to the other is proving more costly and painful than anyone had expected. But the change is desirable, and governments should be seeking to ease the pain of transition, not to stop the process itself.
Apr 17th 2008From The Economist print edition
Food prices are causing misery and strife around the world. Radical solutions are needed
Getty Images
PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.
Today's pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil; even China is worried. Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.
Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.
Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past decade of growth. Because food markets are in turmoil, civil strife is growing; and because trade and openness itself could be undermined, the food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalisation.
First find $700m
Rich countries need to take the food problems as seriously as they take the credit crunch. Already bigwigs at the World Bank and the United Nations are calling for a “new deal” for food. Their clamour is justified. But getting the right kind of help is not so easy, partly because food is not a one-solution-fits-all problem and partly because some of the help needed now risks making matters worse in the long run.
The starting-point should be that rising food prices bear more heavily on some places than others. Food exporters, and countries where farmers are self-sufficient, or net sellers, benefit. Some countries—those in West Africa which import their staples, or Bangladesh, with its huge numbers of landless labourers—risk ruin and civil strife. Because of the severity there, the first step must be to mend the holes in the world's safety net. That means financing the World Food Programme properly. The WFP is the world's largest distributor of food aid and its most important barrier between hungry people and starvation. Like a $1-a-day family in a developing country, its purchasing power has been slashed by the rising cost of grain. Merely to distribute the same amount of food as last year, the WFP needs—and should get—an extra $700m.
And because the problems in many places are not like those of a traditional famine, the WFP should be allowed to broaden what it does. At the moment, it mostly buys grain and doles it out in areas where there is little or no food. That is necessary in famine-ravaged places, but it damages local markets. In most places there are no absolute shortages and the task is to lower domestic prices without doing too much harm to farmers. That is best done by distributing cash, not food—by supporting (sometimes inventing) social-protection programmes and food-for-work schemes for the poor. The agency can help here, though the main burden—tens of billions of dollars' worth—will be borne by developing-country governments and lending institutions in the West.
Such actions are palliatives. But the food crisis of 2008 has revealed market failures at every link of the food chain. Any “new deal” ought to try to address the long-term problems that are holding poor farmers back.
Then stop the distortions
In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.
For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.
There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should keep out of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual farmers to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce higher-yielding seeds. But be careful. Too often—as in Europe, where superstitious distrust of genetic modification is slowing take-up of the technology—governments hinder rather than help such advances. Since the way to feed the world is not to bring more land under cultivation, but to increase yields, science is crucial.
Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With luck and good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition from one to the other is proving more costly and painful than anyone had expected. But the change is desirable, and governments should be seeking to ease the pain of transition, not to stop the process itself.
vendredi 4 juillet 2008
So You Want Something to Read, eh? Glad to hear!
Happy 4th of July!!!!!!!!!!
Hanging out in the Cesspool of Detroit, Senegal, eating fruit and veggies.
Unlike many PC Senegal Vols, I chose not to go to Kedegou for the annual bash, in large part because I’ve been feeling guilty about being out of site so much for my first few months, mainly due to my charret accident, and Kedegou is quite a trek from the Delta. I have mixed thoughts on it. I really miss the kids from my Stage and almost all of them are there, but for the past week or so have been frustrated on language and general integration. There is a list of recommended things to do in your first few months at site and I’m at least a month behind. It’s just been in the past few weeks that I’ve ventured out of my compound alone, to walk even just to my counterpart’s house, and just this past week or two that I’ve been walking around, without much purpose than to greet anyone I saw. These are things that I should have done in my first few weeks, but was a mixture of too overwhelmed and too busy still learning names of people in my compound (still learning…new people seem to show up every week!). I haven’t yet started to survey people much about the community or even health issues, so I felt like taking nearly a week going down to the Gou would only further hurt it. It’s not that I’m not doing anything, but it’s mostly been with my family or with the Vols nearest me, so I’m branching out, a little. A friendly visit to Sally’s compound (Sally from the charret incident) turned into an ambush of questions on family planning (which I cannot yet adequately answer in Serere, fyi) and people’s names. Not quite what I was prepared for.
And, the women want me to host a meeting about Malaria (fr: palaudisme, s: sibiru) before the Rainy Season starts. Fab. Great. Wonderful. The problem: my vocabulary is not yet adequate to host an entire meeting, complete with fast questions and old wive’s tales that I won’t understand. Oh yea, and the Rainy Season basically started this past weekend, so it needs to happen ASAP. Yea…will be talking to Sally upon my return from Kaolack about when, but probably within the next week or so.
Even with my language frustrations, in some ways I have (slowly) been doing a little health-related and community work. Two weeks ago I helped with the Vitamin A (for eyes) and de-worming vaccine plus USAID-supplied mosquito net distribution to children under 5, in my area. It was a stressful several days, mainly because I don’t understand more than a few words of Wolof, I was the only “toubab” and thus became the subject of super irritating “TOUBAB!!!!!!!!!!!!” comments, and even though I was with health workers and Red Cross Senegal people, the marriage offers and general annoyances I constantly receive never stopped, nor did any of my “friends” from the health post help me out when I was being harassed. It was annoying. The good part was that I was able to do a pretty extensive tour of many of the surrounding villages, even the ones quite far away, and now feel like I have a better understanding of the area. Though we went to many Serere villages, the language used was Wolof (bc not all of the volunteers helping with the drive speak Serere), so it was cool to impress a few people with my Serere. I also received a lesson on last names and how to generally tell Wolof/Serere/Pulaar based on the last name (more so than I could before) and the Frenchified spellings of Senegalese first names. However, the man I was teamed up with (We were divided into groups of 2 or 3. I was also teamed up with my nurse counterpart’s eldest daughter, a very cool girl), was ridiculous, condescending, refused to speak Serere to me (he would sometimes speak it to the people in the village), only spoke French to me, and basically treated me like an idiot. I had to remind myself that I work for the Corps de la PAIX (PEACE) and that murder is not really in my Health Vol job description. Anyway, one of the days we got to my village, so it was awesome for people from my community to see me doing some health-related work, even if I didn’t know everyone’s names, lol.
The drive was Tuesday-Thursday ALL DAY, but then I had to go back to the Health Post both Friday and Saturday to make sure the eligible kids in my compound got their nets (coupons were distributed in compounds and then the mothers had to take the coupons to a central spot in the village or to the Post), because nets were quickly running out and I wanted to make sure everyone got their nets. Sometime during the week, however, I drank some bad water or something because Saturday early AM I woke up FREEZING COLD, had to get my fleece blanket from my suitcase and registered a temp of 102.3. Somehow, I (barely) made it to the Post to get my sister one last net, but that’s about all of the work I could do for a few days. I spent the next few days “hanging out” in my douche, drinking water and ORS (oral rehydration salts and Tang, to fight dehydration), barely able to eat from stomach pains, unable to sleep due to terrible headaches, laying on the floor trying to get comfortable, laying in my bed (yes, bed!) trying to get comfortable (not possible, it’s a horrible bed!), and kicking myself for not packing Lipton soup or anything stomach-friendly before coming to Senegal. However, my family gave me a small banana Saturday night with my dinner (ate alone in my hut after refusing to eat lunch that day). It’s probably the nicest gift I have received since coming to this country bc I have NO CLUE where a banana is available in a 20km radius of my village. Maybe someone went to the weekly market several towns over, but no one had mentioned that to me. Anyway, it was possible the best banana I’ve ever had (mainly bc it had been quite a few weeks since I had eaten a banana and was craving one). After several days and probably a few pounds lost, I’m much better and the stomach pains are mostly gone, thanks to Cipro, a PCVs best friend and PCMO drug of choice. However, it’s very difficult as a Health Volunteer to explain to your family why you didn’t visit the Health Post though you are extremely sick, while trying to encourage them to go them for the same reason, or to bring their children with their weird skin infections to the Post for proper treatment. And, Village Med says I got sick bc I walk too much and too fast, worked too hard last week, and mixed water from different villages (not that the water I had was bad, just that it was mixed). Okay.
Spent several afternoons this week hanging out with the two teachers left in the village. They are fun, and I think a little lonely, so get excited when I stop by. They will be good people to work with, esp as the entire Health Program is shifting to working with the schools, which I’m quite excited about.
My goal here in Kaolack this weekend is to rest, get some vitamins in my diet (it’s been about two weeks since I had a veggie that wasn’t an onion…), buy some staple foods for when I next get sick/Rainy Season, get a few more hut supplies, and write an article to the PCSenegal newsletter about Lessons Learned during the first few months at site. A fellow Vol thought I would be the perfect person to write up about some of my experiences already. Lol, but so true!
Hanging out in the Cesspool of Detroit, Senegal, eating fruit and veggies.
Unlike many PC Senegal Vols, I chose not to go to Kedegou for the annual bash, in large part because I’ve been feeling guilty about being out of site so much for my first few months, mainly due to my charret accident, and Kedegou is quite a trek from the Delta. I have mixed thoughts on it. I really miss the kids from my Stage and almost all of them are there, but for the past week or so have been frustrated on language and general integration. There is a list of recommended things to do in your first few months at site and I’m at least a month behind. It’s just been in the past few weeks that I’ve ventured out of my compound alone, to walk even just to my counterpart’s house, and just this past week or two that I’ve been walking around, without much purpose than to greet anyone I saw. These are things that I should have done in my first few weeks, but was a mixture of too overwhelmed and too busy still learning names of people in my compound (still learning…new people seem to show up every week!). I haven’t yet started to survey people much about the community or even health issues, so I felt like taking nearly a week going down to the Gou would only further hurt it. It’s not that I’m not doing anything, but it’s mostly been with my family or with the Vols nearest me, so I’m branching out, a little. A friendly visit to Sally’s compound (Sally from the charret incident) turned into an ambush of questions on family planning (which I cannot yet adequately answer in Serere, fyi) and people’s names. Not quite what I was prepared for.
And, the women want me to host a meeting about Malaria (fr: palaudisme, s: sibiru) before the Rainy Season starts. Fab. Great. Wonderful. The problem: my vocabulary is not yet adequate to host an entire meeting, complete with fast questions and old wive’s tales that I won’t understand. Oh yea, and the Rainy Season basically started this past weekend, so it needs to happen ASAP. Yea…will be talking to Sally upon my return from Kaolack about when, but probably within the next week or so.
Even with my language frustrations, in some ways I have (slowly) been doing a little health-related and community work. Two weeks ago I helped with the Vitamin A (for eyes) and de-worming vaccine plus USAID-supplied mosquito net distribution to children under 5, in my area. It was a stressful several days, mainly because I don’t understand more than a few words of Wolof, I was the only “toubab” and thus became the subject of super irritating “TOUBAB!!!!!!!!!!!!” comments, and even though I was with health workers and Red Cross Senegal people, the marriage offers and general annoyances I constantly receive never stopped, nor did any of my “friends” from the health post help me out when I was being harassed. It was annoying. The good part was that I was able to do a pretty extensive tour of many of the surrounding villages, even the ones quite far away, and now feel like I have a better understanding of the area. Though we went to many Serere villages, the language used was Wolof (bc not all of the volunteers helping with the drive speak Serere), so it was cool to impress a few people with my Serere. I also received a lesson on last names and how to generally tell Wolof/Serere/Pulaar based on the last name (more so than I could before) and the Frenchified spellings of Senegalese first names. However, the man I was teamed up with (We were divided into groups of 2 or 3. I was also teamed up with my nurse counterpart’s eldest daughter, a very cool girl), was ridiculous, condescending, refused to speak Serere to me (he would sometimes speak it to the people in the village), only spoke French to me, and basically treated me like an idiot. I had to remind myself that I work for the Corps de la PAIX (PEACE) and that murder is not really in my Health Vol job description. Anyway, one of the days we got to my village, so it was awesome for people from my community to see me doing some health-related work, even if I didn’t know everyone’s names, lol.
The drive was Tuesday-Thursday ALL DAY, but then I had to go back to the Health Post both Friday and Saturday to make sure the eligible kids in my compound got their nets (coupons were distributed in compounds and then the mothers had to take the coupons to a central spot in the village or to the Post), because nets were quickly running out and I wanted to make sure everyone got their nets. Sometime during the week, however, I drank some bad water or something because Saturday early AM I woke up FREEZING COLD, had to get my fleece blanket from my suitcase and registered a temp of 102.3. Somehow, I (barely) made it to the Post to get my sister one last net, but that’s about all of the work I could do for a few days. I spent the next few days “hanging out” in my douche, drinking water and ORS (oral rehydration salts and Tang, to fight dehydration), barely able to eat from stomach pains, unable to sleep due to terrible headaches, laying on the floor trying to get comfortable, laying in my bed (yes, bed!) trying to get comfortable (not possible, it’s a horrible bed!), and kicking myself for not packing Lipton soup or anything stomach-friendly before coming to Senegal. However, my family gave me a small banana Saturday night with my dinner (ate alone in my hut after refusing to eat lunch that day). It’s probably the nicest gift I have received since coming to this country bc I have NO CLUE where a banana is available in a 20km radius of my village. Maybe someone went to the weekly market several towns over, but no one had mentioned that to me. Anyway, it was possible the best banana I’ve ever had (mainly bc it had been quite a few weeks since I had eaten a banana and was craving one). After several days and probably a few pounds lost, I’m much better and the stomach pains are mostly gone, thanks to Cipro, a PCVs best friend and PCMO drug of choice. However, it’s very difficult as a Health Volunteer to explain to your family why you didn’t visit the Health Post though you are extremely sick, while trying to encourage them to go them for the same reason, or to bring their children with their weird skin infections to the Post for proper treatment. And, Village Med says I got sick bc I walk too much and too fast, worked too hard last week, and mixed water from different villages (not that the water I had was bad, just that it was mixed). Okay.
Spent several afternoons this week hanging out with the two teachers left in the village. They are fun, and I think a little lonely, so get excited when I stop by. They will be good people to work with, esp as the entire Health Program is shifting to working with the schools, which I’m quite excited about.
My goal here in Kaolack this weekend is to rest, get some vitamins in my diet (it’s been about two weeks since I had a veggie that wasn’t an onion…), buy some staple foods for when I next get sick/Rainy Season, get a few more hut supplies, and write an article to the PCSenegal newsletter about Lessons Learned during the first few months at site. A fellow Vol thought I would be the perfect person to write up about some of my experiences already. Lol, but so true!
Bugs and the Start of the Rainy Season
So anyone who knows me well should know that I have a bit of an irrational fear of the creepy and crawly, namely bugs, insects, xurur/kurur (Serere), whatever you want to call them. Well, with the onset of almost daily rains this past week (sometimes overnight, some afternoon, am, etc), creepy things have suddenly appeared and taken over. It began with the flying termites (Yes…) on Saturday or Sunday (don’t know, I was sick) that filled the air with white specks like cotton and grew as the day progressed. Then came flying black beetles, almost like June Bugs, but larger and land hard on you and buzz loudly as they fly around and eww… One actually tormented my sleep Monday night by somehow getting INSIDE my mosquito net. Not fun. Then came millipedes/centipedes at least 6inches long and soooo creepy (I’m getting good though at sweeping them out of my hut). Also in this mix are scorpions (host dad killed one two nights ago and it was the 3rd I had seen that day), new spiders, large moths, mosquitos, cockroaches (one in my room, yuck!), and random other large insects. And this is just after the first few rains. I’m already not amused by the rainy season and am dreading what else comes. Ew!
I should have taken some pics, but I guess those will have to wait, but it’s incredible the way the grass and weeds spring up after the rains. The road from my village to town already looks like a totally different country and the contrast from the green grass and trees to the blue of the sky is sooo beautiful. However, I’ve recently learned (from teachers and own observation), that the road becomes virtually impassable in about a month because the ground is SO saturated with water. Apparently, you have to take off your shoes and tread in the water barefoot…great way to get an infection. Already, the horses and donkeys with charrets have a difficult time traversing the only partially-flooded road. It’s not just my rural road that’s a problem. Apparently the next village over (nearest Volunteer and where I did my site visit), basically becomes an island surrounded by water and rice fields bc the ground is so flooded and the river is high too. This morning, it was rough just getting to Kaolack bc the already HORRIBLE road and surrounding fields (where half of the driving is done bc the road is so bad) were full of water from the early am’s rain and it took at least half an hour longer than usual, not to mention way more bumps, just to navigate the road. Annoying. That, and the already-smelly Kaolack is now full of mud, water, and raw sewage everywhere. Not a fun place to be.
The start of the rains also means that people are back to work. The millet was planted a few weeks ago, but peanuts have to wait until the rains begin, so now my family (and everyone else in the area, for that matter) has taken to the fields to plant old-school style (ox and plow or horse and plow, not American farming-style machines). The past few weeks have seen the women in every single compound break into their peanut stash, smash and sort the shells from the nut/bean/whatever, and then hand sort individual peanuts based on ones that can be planted as seeds and ones that won’t seed and will instead be cooked for a meal. In another month, once things have started growing, EVERYONE (men, women, kids, etc) will be tending to the fields, peanut, millit, and rice. The teachers and my nurse counterpart have asked what I will do then, when everyone is gone and in the fields? Probably a mix of learning how to work in the fields (yea, I know…but it’s what you do here and people already seem annoyed I haven’t yet been to the fields—hello, I’ve been SICK and unable to eat your food!), hoping to talk health as people work, reading/studying, and then there is the almost month-long IST. Oh, and avoiding creepy crawly things…ew.
I should have taken some pics, but I guess those will have to wait, but it’s incredible the way the grass and weeds spring up after the rains. The road from my village to town already looks like a totally different country and the contrast from the green grass and trees to the blue of the sky is sooo beautiful. However, I’ve recently learned (from teachers and own observation), that the road becomes virtually impassable in about a month because the ground is SO saturated with water. Apparently, you have to take off your shoes and tread in the water barefoot…great way to get an infection. Already, the horses and donkeys with charrets have a difficult time traversing the only partially-flooded road. It’s not just my rural road that’s a problem. Apparently the next village over (nearest Volunteer and where I did my site visit), basically becomes an island surrounded by water and rice fields bc the ground is so flooded and the river is high too. This morning, it was rough just getting to Kaolack bc the already HORRIBLE road and surrounding fields (where half of the driving is done bc the road is so bad) were full of water from the early am’s rain and it took at least half an hour longer than usual, not to mention way more bumps, just to navigate the road. Annoying. That, and the already-smelly Kaolack is now full of mud, water, and raw sewage everywhere. Not a fun place to be.
The start of the rains also means that people are back to work. The millet was planted a few weeks ago, but peanuts have to wait until the rains begin, so now my family (and everyone else in the area, for that matter) has taken to the fields to plant old-school style (ox and plow or horse and plow, not American farming-style machines). The past few weeks have seen the women in every single compound break into their peanut stash, smash and sort the shells from the nut/bean/whatever, and then hand sort individual peanuts based on ones that can be planted as seeds and ones that won’t seed and will instead be cooked for a meal. In another month, once things have started growing, EVERYONE (men, women, kids, etc) will be tending to the fields, peanut, millit, and rice. The teachers and my nurse counterpart have asked what I will do then, when everyone is gone and in the fields? Probably a mix of learning how to work in the fields (yea, I know…but it’s what you do here and people already seem annoyed I haven’t yet been to the fields—hello, I’ve been SICK and unable to eat your food!), hoping to talk health as people work, reading/studying, and then there is the almost month-long IST. Oh, and avoiding creepy crawly things…ew.
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