Kenya appears to me after ten days to be a land of contradictions. The countryside we drive to isolated rural medical clinics through is lush and grows sugar cane, every small farm has corn, underplanted with beans, roadside stalls sell gorgeous red onions, fruit, tomatoes and brassicas. Yet at each clinic I see starving, malnourished children and adults. The children universally have Kwashiorkor – protein deficiency, everyone is severely anaemic.
I have not quite been able to work out why these farming people are starving while growing so much good food. Our driver tells us “In the old days, when our old people lived longer…” so I’m not sure whether it was Kenyan independence from British rule in the early 1960s that caused the collapse of the rural communities or something more recent.
The staple here is ugali, a maize meal very like polenta, most families have hot tea for breakfast, followed by ugali alone for lunch and dinner, despite growing beans and brassicas they don’t commonly eat them. The teachers volunteering here tell us that in school the curriculum specifically teaches that eating ugali is vital to the Kenyan economy and much is made of eating lots of it being the only way to succeed academically.
Women have no status in rural Kenya, little access to education or contraception or independent income, domestic abuse is widespread.
At each rural clinic, which are held in schools or churches, I have been approached by people raising money for a new church or to make the existing one better. There is a church about every 200m! I am most uncomfortable that community leaders are raising money for churches while children starve. The stark contrast between the teachings of the church and the behaviours of the people is also confronting, corruption is endemic, at every police checkpoint, within the organisation with which we are volunteering, in every transaction in the town.
To illustrate my own hypocrisy however, I must point out that while the local kids starve, I am sooo sick of endless rice and cabbage for dinner and lunch every day and am having trouble being grateful for that!
I think I would be feeling pretty protein deficient if I ate rice and cabbage everyday. But yes, it’s hard not to feel hypocritical when Kenyan children are starving. How very sad. Do they not grow enough beans?
They seem to grow enough, the gardens are beautiful! I think the market price is worth more to the family than the nutrition, plus there is ignorance about the need for the protein.
The shelves of European supermarkets are rammed with perfect Kenyan mange tout and perfect Kenyan starfruit. They grow loads of stuff for export, but their own people are undernourished. Pressure from the IMF as I understand it, support comes as long as they take measures to keep their trade balance healthy. I also think that debt repayments play their part in why people starve in a land of plenty.
I recommend Sweet Honey in the Rock: ‘Ode to the International Debt’