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Food Assistance Restores Community

October 5, 2005

By pwrdf

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Niger: Famine Update #2

“Africa cannot develop, prosper, or be truly free on an empty stomach.”
Kofi Annan

Halima’s easy smile belies her hard life as a mother of nine who lost four of her children during childbirth. Unable to provide enough food for the family, Halima’s husband left the village where she has lived in the same 15-foot (1,39 meter) diameter thatched hut for twenty years.  Except, that is, for several months at the beginning of 2005, during the worst of the food crisis.   
“Everybody left the village in January because there was no food,” she relates on the day she received her family’s ten-day ration of millet from Action By Churches Together (ACT) member Lutheran World Relief (LWR). “When I left my village of Sabarou in January, I walked for 48 hours to the town of Dakoro, spending the night on the road with my three young children,” she continues, holding her two year old son. “I found odd jobs there until I could afford the money to pay for a ride to Maradi,” Niger’s third-largest city, an arduous and unpaved three-hour drive away.
Halima found work cleaning houses in Maradi, a city just miles from the Nigerian border. Halima was not alone in leaving. Others in her village were dispersed into Nigeria and neighboring Chad. But good news travels far, and her village has been reunited by the LWR/ACT food distribution.  
An LWR/ACT delegation, led by LWR President Kathryn Wolford, participated in the food distribution that day. They learned that all but two of the 200 families in this village had abandoned the village in search of food and work. Word of the planned distribution of millet, Niger’s staple food, traveled fast and far despite the lack of physical communications infrastructure. 
By the day of the distribution, in early September, all but twenty families had returned. Halima sits next to LWR’s Niger Country Representative, Ramatou Adamou, herself a Nigerien.
Part of Ramatou’s commanding presence, in addition to her intelligence, confidence and endearing smile is her large size. In some parts of Niger, beauty contests are held where women compete to become the heaviest, and therefore, the most beautiful. When asked how the food shortage has affected her family, Halima places a kindly hand on Ramatou’s ample arm and replies, “I used to be as big as she is.”  Halima is less than half Ramatou’s size. 
In Sabarou, villagers spoke of the impact of four years of failed harvests and the drain on their meager assets.  They told the visitors that the food they received would give them strength to work in the upcoming harvest and help to restore their sense of community. The village chief asked Wolford to share the village’s deep gratitude with all who had donated money to help them in this time of crisis. 
For some, the aid was still too little and too late, showing at a very human and personal scale the reality of the slow national and international response to the food crisis. 
Several women held small children, whose appearance indicated severe malnutrition and their need for therapeutic feeding.  A therapeutic feeding center in Dakoro currently serves 2,700 babies and their mothers, and sadly, the numbers being admitted are still climbing. It was photos and stories of children like these in the international media that finally galvanized international aid, months after aid agencies and the UN issued the first alarm bells.  
ACT members are currently implementing an emergency appeal to provide short term supplemental food assistance to affected villages in the Dakoro area of Maradi region, Dogueraoua and Yama in Tahoua region and Balleyara in Tillaberi region. ACT works with and through local Nigerien partner organizations, who have ongoing food security and development programs in each area. 
Thanks to these pre-existing relationships and knowledge of the communities, ACT was quickly able to mobilize and engage local village communities to assist in the assessments and food distribution.  The ACT response also includes building cereal banks, stocking cereal and seed banks, and training of local village committees in managing the banks to help replenish their depleted assets and help cushion future lean periods in this chronically food insecure area. 
ACT is a global alliance of churches and related agencies working to save lives and support communities in emergencies worldwide. The ACT Coordinating Office is based with the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation in Switzerland.  

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