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Hunger: More suffering for women, kids
2006-01-12 09:17:26
By Correspondent Holidah John
Do you know one of the pains of motherhood, worse than childbirth? It is to force to bed in the evening your young children, without a meal, because you have got nothing to feed them with, though they can barely understand the logic of life like hunger or plentiful harvest.
The mother looks at her children, their crying calling eyes and soothes them to bed as her heart burns with fire of anguish, cursing the day, she was born.
How can you be able to face the world ever again, when your own blood dies of hunger?
I know a mother of three in Dar es Salaam whose husband doesn’t care about providing for the family and the little money he makes as a casual labourer goes to the drink.
Always she has suffered the fate of sending her kids who are between three and six years.
The woman is enterprising and by her own initiative has learnt to plait hair expertly. Sometimes in the past, she at least would get a lady daily at the neighbourhood to mend her hair at a small consideration.
The problem was her monster husband, to say the least, who violently stopped her from working, accusing her that men would want her if she continued venturing out of the house too often.
Many are the days she had to rely on neighbours for handouts to feed her young family.
’’It breaks my heart. It kills me slowly everyday when I don’t give my kids anything during the day and at night,’’she told me.
’’Mother I am hungry, the child tells you, all his hopes lodged on you and you know you have got nothing to feed him with, though it the child’s right to be fed by you,’’ the lady had told me as tears welled up her eyes.
Her malnourished children could not understand why they had to go hungry for days. Thanks God, I persuaded her to leave the husband and with some money contributed by the neighbours who all thought his husband was weird.
She has moved to another part of Dar es Salaam to start life a new, as a single parent. Not many victims of real hunger are so lucky.
It is now official; none other than our newly-elected President, Jakaya Kikwete, has forewarned the country of eminent hunger, that is, if it does not rain adequately in the first half of January.
Already, countrywide hunger waves have started reeling their hungry heads.
Today, a kilogramme of maize flour sells at between 500/- and 600/-. The song is the same for other staple food-stuffs with only slight variations. This simply means many people will have to learn to live with one meal per day until the next harvest, that is, if it rains at all.
Under our much-vetted patriarchal family system (even by womenfolk), the man is the lion of the homestead and he can only go to kitchen when it’s extremely cold to warm his legs at the fireplace.
It is the woman who manages the kitchen budget, whether she gets support from her lion or not.
Note that food prices have risen up so high, not many lions will top up the kitchen budget. They will say, ”My income has not increased, you have to do with what we have.’’
I am sorry for my sisters in the rural areas, thought they are the actual producers, most of their granaries have been emptied by their lions, who have sold all the past season’s harvest, and God knows what they did with the money.
And when there will be no food at all in the house, the man will ensure he is not at home to answer the children cries.
This is an established trend in Africa – when hunger crises bites, especially in rural and remote areas men run away from home - only women, children and the elderly are left.
What I am putting home here is that the looming food crisis means more suffering for the women and children.
If women were to be allowed to manage food harvests in times of plenty, in times of hunger there would always be enough stock set aside for bad times.
Malawi in the last few months was importing maize from Tanzania. Does this mean we have enough foodstock to avert the looming crisis?
Stocks released from the National Grain Reserves, will traders not take advantage and sell the same at exorbitant prices to the wananchi?
Steps must be taken to ensure, no child, no woman or man from our motherland dies of hunger.
It is the most form of painful and slow death that you can ever imagine. No Tanzanian or any one for that matter deserves such a death.
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