* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
You travel through the countryside in Mali, heading to Tominian district – about 400 kilometres away from the capital of Bamako, towards the border with Burkina Faso. You have six to seven hours to take in the world unfolding around you. The baobab trees with tortured branches; the mango trees – leaves heavy under the dust – guarding the roads; the empty, yellow or grayish fields, thirsty for water. ‘If we only had water, we could grow vegetables, crops here….But in places like this, you would have to dig 12-13 meters to get to some. And even then, you might not find any,’ comments Abraham, our driver, as if reading your thoughts.
You pass by markets stalls – shabby wooden benches and tables surrounded by shaky poles covered with hay roofs. Outside and not far from Bamako, you can see a palette of vegetables and fruits – melons, bananas, tomatoes, lettuce, oranges, apples, peanuts, baobab fruits – but as you drive further, deeper in the countryside, they become scarce – mainly baobab fruits or powder, and peanuts. Occasionally, you catch glimpses of a butcher, with one slab of goat meat hanging in the dusty, hot air. You can almost feel the dust in your eyes, in your throat, and you look away, ahead of you.
You ask Abraham what life is like where he lives and works, in Kolokani (60 kilometres North-West of Bamako). ‘Lot of the families there have nothing to eat,’ he says, adding that in many villages you can only see now women and children as the men have left, desperate to find work somewhere else to help their families. ‘How do people cope in the meanwhile?’ you probe. ‘Solidarity,’ he answers simply. ‘People help each other in these times. And as things get worse, we start selling our animals. The small ones go first – chickens, for example, then gradually the larger ones – the oxen, the donkeys.’
By ‘in these times’, Abraham means the food and nutrition crisis engulfing Mali and a number of other countries in West Africa. Three million people are affected by the crisis across Mali, out of which 1.1 million are in need of immediate food assistance according to World Food Program.
As to make matters worse, Radio France International is playing in the background, spewing out more bad news. 65,000 people displaced due to fighting in the North of Mali, with 40,000 of them having fled and settled on the border with Niger, Mauritania or Burkina Faso, adding more pressure on already limited or exhausted food supplies in those areas, announces the broadcaster quoting the Red Cross. Sadly since then the numbers have reached 130,000 according to UN estimates (as of 24 Feb).
You look out of the window again to distract yourself. You smile as for a few split seconds you pass a little girl stretched out on her belly on a bench, her playmate tickling, massaging her feet lifted in the air. They are both laughing. You drive further and your eyes meet a 4, 5-year-old boy who is diligently placing empty bottles in a used tire – in what looks like an attempt to make bike spins out of them. You think to yourself: kids are kids, no matter where.
But are they? You pass a school in the middle of a bare land, looking desolate in sync with the surrounding landscape, and you wonder what it would be like to grow up in a place like this, to go to a school here.
You find answers as you reach your destination, a mother telling you they can’t send their children to school anymore as they are hungry, and as a result, too tired to focus on their studies or walk to the school in the first place; a father explaining that he has sold most of his harvest to pay for school fees for his oldest son, as he really believes in the value of schooling. But he was still short of about 75,000 CFA ($150) on the payments and didn't know what he was going to do. Worse, he had had to pull his second son out of school as he could not afford to send him at all.
Overall, the situation is bad, and it is clearly getting worse. Village elders say the last time they faced a situation as bad as
this was in 1973-74. They talk about last year’s harvest. It was poor, they say, and they’ve already run out of it or about to do so. Prices of grains in some places are more than double the prices of last year, and in some communities you find out that prices go up to 10%-30% in a single week. You see silos after silos empty or nearly so. Yet, the next harvest in not for another 8-9 months.
‘If we are left to cope on our own, we are hopeless,’ says 65-year-old Zaniba. ’Without your help, we are hopeless,’ she repeats staring in front of her. ‘We only wish that God would bless us with rain so everyone has something to eat,’ says another mother, 46-year-old Bessimba. Maria, a mother of 11 children, walks out of her small, mud built, windowless kitchen room – with four burnt pots lined near the dark walls – showing a ball of millet paste. ‘This is what we have left from this morning, and I am not sure this will be enough for all of us for dinner,’ she says. They eat once a day, and if there is something left, they have it for dinner, starting the portioning with the children as often the remaining food is not enough for the whole family. ‘When we sleep at night, we worry about the next day,’ adds her husband Sikian.
You speak to many more people. Their stories come in many forms, but their message is all the same: they are just not sure how they will cope, what they will do.
But the question really is: what will we? We have two choices: sit and wait until it’s too late, or act now.
PHOTO: Maria, a mother of 11 children shows a ball of millet paste. ‘This is what we have left from this morning, and I am not sure this will be enough for all of us for dinner,’ she says.
