Prometheus 6

I'm having a bit of trouble actually saying something about this series. Being your typical spoiled, well-fed, rain never falls on me while I sleep American, the concept of living on a dollar per day has no real meaning to me. I'm not sure I can say the series really helps me gain a sense of the realities involved—I've been hungry, not just wanting food or being at the scheduled time to receive food but physically requiring food, as a result of diabetes denial in the past. But that was a result of my own inaction and denial…I can't imagine having that physical sensation for one's whole life.

Part three, titled For sale -- cheap: 'Dead white men's clothing' is, to me, further proof of my provinciality because it touches something I'm actually familiar with:

Insatiable demand from village shops and sprawling urban markets has turned the West's castoffs into an industry that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Clothing is only the most visible example. Polluting refrigerators and air conditioners, expired medicines and old mattresses also are routinely shipped and resold here. Used vehicles imported from Japan dot African roads. Antiquated secondhand computers power many African governments.

Mere survival has a long-term cost: The continent is losing the capacity to produce its own clothing. Although labor is cheap, Africans cannot make a shirt that costs as little as a used one. Every textile mill in Zambia has closed. Fewer than 40 of Nigeria's 200 mills remain. The vast majority of textile factories in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi are shuttered as well. Thousands of workers have lost their jobs.

"We are digging our own graves," says Chris Kirubi, a Kenyan industrialist who blamed secondhand clothing for the demise of his textile mill. "When you make your own clothes, you employ farmers to grow cotton, people to work in textile mills and more people to work in clothes factories. When you import secondhand clothes, you become a dumping ground."

The trade in hand-me-downs offers millions of Africans another means to endure their daily struggle with poverty. Shoppers get cheap clothes, and legions of vendors eke out a living one worn T-shirt at a time.

The used clothes most often start out in America. Charities such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army sell donated clothes by the pound to wholesale merchants, who grade them. The top grade usually ends up in vintage shops in the United States, Europe or Latin America. The lesser grade merchandise, much of which is faded or stained, is labeled Africa A and Africa B.

"Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man about Mrs. Paul's and you've got an economic stream for life."

In a way I find it disturbing that the picture of the economic activity in and around starvation gave me a clearer picture than the starvation itself did.

And now I have this disturbing images in my mind of Africa being digested.