This is normal for more people than you'd ever suspect
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Even in the good years, when the rains come to Ethiopia, subsistence farmers barely harvest enough maize, sweet potato and other crops to feed their families. Batire has never had the luxury of allowing her small clumps of false banana trees to fully mature, which would triple her yield. Instead, she shears the trees as soon as her family needs something to eat.
In the cruelest times, people eat sporadically, hoping that a day of searching by whole families can turn up more than morsels.
When everything is gone, the hungry seek handouts from the government or aid groups. But by then, disease often has gripped them. Severe protein deficiency brings on a condition known as kwashiorkor, which condemns its young victims to live their last days marked by telltale blue spots, their faces frozen in mournful expressions.
"If the diseases don't kill us, the drought is coming behind to finish the job," Batire says.
She already has seen half a dozen neighborhood children die this way. And many times, her own children have gone to bed hungry. On those nights, Batire sits trapped in the family's windowless, one-room mud hut — powerless to feed them yet unable to escape their cries for food.
Trading tomorrow to eat today
In shriveled Ethiopia, the search for food is constant. Scraping together one meal often comes at the expense of providing for the next.
By Davan Maharaj
Times Staff Writer
July 12, 2004
FINCHAWA, Ethiopia -- Machete in hand, Batire Baramo steps out of her mud hut before dinnertime and begins whacking at the base of a struggling young tree.
A cornfield lies nearby, every stalk stunted and barren. A coffee bush wilts in a patch of earth so dry that each footstep kicks up a puff of gray dust.
Roots and stems from the false banana tree — so named because it never bears fruit — are all there is for dinner today. Batire will pound them into a pulpy mush that offers little real nutrition but at least will quiet the hunger of her husband and seven children. When those parts of the tree are gone, she will boil the bark. When the bark is gone, she will search for something else.
"This place is cursed," Batire says of the family's half-acre plot.
Life on less than a dollar a day, as most Africans live it, is the unending pursuit of sustenance. In the Horn of Africa, it is a search rarely satisfied.
Ethiopia is one of the five poorest countries in the world and the largest per-capita recipient of humanitarian aid. Nearly half the population of 67 million is malnourished. Every year, millions face starvation. For the very young, life often ends in a sad, blue death.
Behind the statistics lies a harsh reality that helps explain why hunger is such an intractable problem in Africa. When life is so consumed with survival, tomorrow is routinely traded away to fill stomachs today.
