Saturday, October 6, 2012

Food Aid

A couple dozen 50-kilogram bags are stacked on overturned stools in the staff office at Masamba Basic School.  "World Food Program," the bags are stamped.  "Gift of Denmark."  (Or in some cases, Germany.)

It's not the first donation we've had from the WFP, a division of the United Nations.  Last year I sent home a label from a 5-liter jug of cooking oil from Italy.  My mother commented that it was very international oil, having been grown, processed, distributed, etc. all in different countries.  I hadn't noticed the circuitous journey of the food; I just thought it was neat to be seeing firsthand the distribution of what we hear about in the U.S. but don't really know much about.

Such a distribution is happening now.  A Grade 4 pupil is dragging out a bag of maize meal, which cooked with water is the country's staple food, nshima.  (And I do mean staple.  A fellow PCV summed it up, "Nshima: It's what's for dinner.  And lunch.  Breakfast, too.")  Outside, a horde of kids waits noisely as two 9th grade girls, directed by the first and second grade teachers, distribute the food into plastic bags and buckets the kids have brought from home.  A big bowl of maize meal and two cups of some kind of legume per child.  The elevated stoop where they stand is coated in the fine white powder, and since many of the pupils are reusing cheap, thin plastic bags from the local tuck shops, a steady stream of the corn flour and beans falls out of holes and tears in many of them.

If I'm correct, the maize meal was delivered in kernel form.  Rather than being embraced as one may naively imagine (especially from an American perspective, in which anything free becomes terrifically exciting), the food was a source of consternation and caution at a staff meeting last term.  It's maize-selling season, and many Zambians earn a large percentage of their income by selling their harvest to the Food Reserve Agency--that is, to the Zambian government.  Teachers also take part, either by cultivating their own fields, paying laborers to work in their fields, or simply buying maize at a cut rate earlier in the season when farmers are cash-strapped and then re-selling it when the government comes around.  Bags and bags of maize at the school, then, in full view of the local maize selling point, invites not only malfeasance but also the perception of such even if it doesn't take place.

Of course, the food is meant to be eaten by the children, not sold by them, so distributing maize kernels isn't ideal either.  The ideal is a school feeding program.  Easy, right?  The food's here, the kids come, they learn, they eat, and off they all walk into the well-nourished, well-educated, prosperous horizon.

Not quite.  The school's enrollment is roughly ~800, grades 1-9.  Twelve teachers manage them, and we're lucky to have that many on staff.  There is no kitchen or dining hall; cooking in rural areas such as this one is done over an open fire which involves a lot of natural charcoal (which much be purchased from the locals who make it) or firewood (which must be gathered).  And of course, cooking takes time.  (Consider the number of staff who put in hours of hard work every day to prepare lunch at McCook Central, the school in my small hometown in South Dakota, for a much smaller number of students.)

Let's imagine, though, that the school were incredibly well-organized and the community invested.  Community volunteers could be assembled to cook a meal for the pupils, or at least some of them.  This has been done before; on one day, grade one and two pupils ate after lessons; on the next, grades three and four, and so on.  It worked OK, though the distribution of the food to pupils was a bit chaotic (they brought dishes from home and ate communally in small groups) and cut into--as the distribution at this moment is doing--teachers' instructional time with their pupils.  Cooking a meal, though, is more than a raw ingredient and fire. At the very least, it's important to have cooking oil and salt.  Naturally, water must be drawn (and carried) as well.  We have maize meal and legumes.  Free.  Except the cost of oil, salt, and labor to prepare it into a meal for pupils would quickly accumulate.  The assumption by the mere presence of the food is that the school doesn't have money for these things.  And even if oil and salt were donated, how long would this food last?  An organized school meal program for a school this size could take a lot of work and an ongoing supply of food.

But food is food, and we've just reached the end of hungry season, the period during dry season when gardens are fewer (due to no rain) and staples have not yet been harvested.  (Of course, this varies family-to-family based on a multitude of factors.)  So the solution the school reached was to sell a bag of maize to cover the cost of transporting the rest of the maize to the hammer mill, grinding it into meal, and transporting it back.  The children take home the ingredients in their buckets and bags, where the problem of cooking and serving is eliminated; it will become part of the family's meal routine.  In some cases, this meal will make a difference; a child who may have gone to bed hungry will know the comfortable groan of a filled tummy.  In others, the food will seep into the normal supply, appreciated but not life-changing.  In others, it may even cause the night's cook on duty (usually the mother or daughters, but sometimes a son) to overestimate, cook too much, and have more than usual left in the pot and tossed out after the meal.

I'm not opposed to food aid.  Eliminating hunger is an obviously noble and necessary goal and arguably should be an international priority.  The food given was nutritionally sound and culturally appropriate (as opposed to, imagine, air-dropped logs of pepperoni, blocks of cheese, or Little Debbie snacks.)  I'm grateful the food is here and is going to use.  I can't help but see, however, that what seems so simple--Hungry kids in Africa?  Send food aid!--is really much more complex.  Any real solutions will inevitably be local.  This is what I'm learning through the Peace Corps.  It's for this perspective--the one seen at eye level with some of these hungry kids--that I'm most grateful.