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| Junior Farmers showing some strength! |
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Improving, not always...
Sometimes I find it unbelievable that adults grew up in the rural areas where I work daily; that they have spent their entire 40+ years in these hills covered in shrubs and trees. Maybe it’s because I have assumed that for the past 40 years or so conditions have steadily improved here. I mean, present poverty must be better than war-stricken past poverty, right? But where I get confused is when I begin looking at the bamboo huts, soft-brick houses, grass roofs, dirt roads, torn clothes, and lack of resources and remind myself that this current state must be an improvement. If this is the improvement then 40 years ago I would assume that civilization did not even exist. Thus I find it unbelievable that multiple generations of families have come and passed in these hills and this is the result. Often my thoughts and assumptions are as without context as this here paragraph, but yesterday I got a better glimpse into the past.
I was visiting the farmer who had told me about the war refuge in the bush. He is also the leader of a community health and nutrition association under which I have begun a Junior Farmers’ group aimed at involving the local orphans. We were sitting in his 3-room brick house that is currently quite waterlogged from the rains so the interior smells of wet earth. There is no electricity in his house, but holes in the roof let in enough light to make conversation pleasant. He started telling me how he grew up in this very area and how when he was only 6-months old his mother died leaving his father to care for the kids and grow enough food to feed them. In this country, that defined him as an orphan. The conditions that followed left with him many memories mostly traumatic. The only school, in 1971, was a very good distance away from his home and at that time the brush and trees were thick and lions were common. It was a challenge to open and cultivate land, but his father had managed, so he was not set on moving. At age 6 my friend went to live with the cousin of his mother. It was closer to school, but not close to home. His situation, like that of many Mozambican orphans past and present, turned into one of almost servitude. Though family by blood, he was treated differently by his mother’s cousin and her family. He was made to get up at 5am and go to the field only to come back and leave at 6am for school, walk the hour, study all day and then walk home, have to go out in search of firewood and then told to prepare dinner, which includes pounding corn into flour by hand. He was 6. One evening he was making fava beans over the fire, cooking in a large homemade ceramic pot. One of the children of the house told him to slide the pot a bit off the flame so it wouldn’t burn. He did so. Then the mother of the house called and asked for the beans. He turned back to the fire and found one of the children carrying the pot. He was told to carry it so quickly grabbed it, but got burned by hot ceramic and dropped it on the dirt floor. The pot shattered and dinner went into the dirt. The mother of the house was furious. He cleaned up as much as he could and salvaged most of it, but when he finished the mother told him that what was left in the dirt would be his dinner that night. He took some stiff corn porridge and scraped what he could off the ground in the darkness and then went to bed, though didn’t sleep. In the morning he got up and went back to where he had eaten from the ground. There he found, under the beans he had missed, a bunch of chicken feces. He ran home to his father and told him of what had happened and never had to return there.
My friend is now a minister in a small rural church. The main reason he founded the community health and nutrition association was to care for the orphans in his area. Unfortunately, the current situations orphans face are not that much better than 40 years back. Losing one parent makes the challenge of feeding the family enormously more difficult for the other parent, with half as many adult hands to grow the food. Orphans still often end up with relatives, and rarely find conditions equal to that of their cousins in the house, even now. It is hard to accept that improvement has not always been the default. There are so many things to be done. However, in strength they are dirty rich.
I was visiting the farmer who had told me about the war refuge in the bush. He is also the leader of a community health and nutrition association under which I have begun a Junior Farmers’ group aimed at involving the local orphans. We were sitting in his 3-room brick house that is currently quite waterlogged from the rains so the interior smells of wet earth. There is no electricity in his house, but holes in the roof let in enough light to make conversation pleasant. He started telling me how he grew up in this very area and how when he was only 6-months old his mother died leaving his father to care for the kids and grow enough food to feed them. In this country, that defined him as an orphan. The conditions that followed left with him many memories mostly traumatic. The only school, in 1971, was a very good distance away from his home and at that time the brush and trees were thick and lions were common. It was a challenge to open and cultivate land, but his father had managed, so he was not set on moving. At age 6 my friend went to live with the cousin of his mother. It was closer to school, but not close to home. His situation, like that of many Mozambican orphans past and present, turned into one of almost servitude. Though family by blood, he was treated differently by his mother’s cousin and her family. He was made to get up at 5am and go to the field only to come back and leave at 6am for school, walk the hour, study all day and then walk home, have to go out in search of firewood and then told to prepare dinner, which includes pounding corn into flour by hand. He was 6. One evening he was making fava beans over the fire, cooking in a large homemade ceramic pot. One of the children of the house told him to slide the pot a bit off the flame so it wouldn’t burn. He did so. Then the mother of the house called and asked for the beans. He turned back to the fire and found one of the children carrying the pot. He was told to carry it so quickly grabbed it, but got burned by hot ceramic and dropped it on the dirt floor. The pot shattered and dinner went into the dirt. The mother of the house was furious. He cleaned up as much as he could and salvaged most of it, but when he finished the mother told him that what was left in the dirt would be his dinner that night. He took some stiff corn porridge and scraped what he could off the ground in the darkness and then went to bed, though didn’t sleep. In the morning he got up and went back to where he had eaten from the ground. There he found, under the beans he had missed, a bunch of chicken feces. He ran home to his father and told him of what had happened and never had to return there.
My friend is now a minister in a small rural church. The main reason he founded the community health and nutrition association was to care for the orphans in his area. Unfortunately, the current situations orphans face are not that much better than 40 years back. Losing one parent makes the challenge of feeding the family enormously more difficult for the other parent, with half as many adult hands to grow the food. Orphans still often end up with relatives, and rarely find conditions equal to that of their cousins in the house, even now. It is hard to accept that improvement has not always been the default. There are so many things to be done. However, in strength they are dirty rich.
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