I can’t decide if I should pull the centipede off my wall and feed it to the chickens, or if I want to continue to watch his journey across my room for the next few days.
What a conundrum.
I brought a loaf of bread back from Arequipa for my family. This is regularity as there are no ovens here and by the time bread makes it to our village it is stale. But, this time, I bought delicacy 5-grain bread for them. I gave it to them yesterday for breakfast. Today, when I went to get eggs for my breakfast I asked my host mother if she wanted anything. “Pansitos”- ‘bread’. At first I thought I misheard her, and then I saw the empty bread bag on the floor in the place where we cook.
Another volunteer forwarded me a fascinating article about world hunger and food security. They tell a short story about a man in West Java, Indonesia.
“Pak Solhin himself survived on the roughly 9 pounds of subsidized rice he got every week from the government and on the fish he caught at the nearby lake… … In the week before we last spoke with him, he had eaten two meals a day for four days, and just one for the other three.”
I can’t think of one time when my host family had more than one meal a day. A couple slices of bread and tea for breakfast (is that considered a meal?is a loaf a meal?), a full plate of rice, potatoes, and some sort of meat or broth mid afternoon, and then maybe a couple slices of bread for dinner.
I have found that here, it isn’t that there is a lack of food. Rice, potatoes, and corn are plentiful and sold at market to buy cell phones and television sets. The problem isn’t that people don’t feel full at the end of the day, the problem lies in the fact that they are eating the wrong kinds of food, depriving them of the nutrients necessary to be successful, healthy adults. And the priorities are all fuced up (in my humble opinion). As this article perspicaciously writes, development experts and policymakers need to completely re-imagine the way we think about hunger. Money needs to be poured less into funding bringing food to communities, and more into teaching them how to grow the foods their body needs.
I was sitting on a comvi last week and a man was venting to a neighbor in harsh Spanish/Quechua about the presidential candidates. Ollanta has been rumored to possibly kick everything that isn’t Peruvian out of the country including big businesses and NGOs.
“NGOs have made Peruvians lazy. We used to know how to farm, now city-dwellers sit on their butts begging the NGOs to give them food and work. They are dependent and it is disgusting. We need the NGOs out. NGOs have made the Peruvian people weak.”
There was a young man named Travis that was touring Peru for a few months. I met him about a month ago before he headed back to The States where he farms in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Among the many things he taught me, he shared a story about wheat farming in The States. Because farming is no longer economically logical, the US government supplements farmers to grow basics like wheat. He says this has created a surplus in wheat that the government decided to donate to countries in Latin America, like Peru. But, because these donations create an excess of wheat, it drives down the price of wheat in the market, and farmers here can no longer afford to grow and sell it here. This creates a dependency on the United States because few farmers grow wheat in Peru anymore. Unconsciously (or consciously), our government has successfully found ways to stay a superpower through similar methods all over the world.
I am hungry.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are_hungry_in_the_world?page=full
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