David Andrews, Chairman of the Irish Red Cross/Crois Dhearg na nÉireann
FINDING new ways to convey the horror of hunger in Africa powerfully enough to get people galvanised in support of our East Africa Appeal is a daunting challenge.
Africa? Hunger? And what’s new?
Sadly, for this generation there is little that is apparently new. Living, as we do, in a constantly changing world, with new “news” rolling across our tv, computer and mobile phone screens we expect stories to unfold, change, and develop.
Gripping dramatic images of sudden catastrophic events; wars, hurricanes and floods, provide us with the immediate sound and view of the bystander. From the grainy images of the cross-haired so-called “precision bombing” of air-attacks to the see-sawing shots of a flood or a hurricane captured on a tourist camcorder, our understanding and empathy, for the suffering of our fellow man and woman is shaped by what we see in a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Africa, it would appear, is different; this is a story without an end. The problems are constant and insoluble, trade-imbalances, environmental catastrophes and conflict.
Actually, it is in fact the ends of the stories in Africa that we don’t see that are the cruelest of tragedies surfacing today in this continent’s great swollen sea of suffering.
The end of life, for example, for the 15,000 African men women and children who die every day from preventable, treatable diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, the end of childhood for the 10 million children who have lost their parents to AIDS, and the end of hope for the 11 million people here in Eastern Africa who now need our help in their battle against starvation.
What I’ve seen here on my visit to Kenya with the Red Cross has been both heart-rending and horrific. We are not talking of the biblical scenes of dead and dying pot-bellied young children that we associate with famine on our teatime news. The fly-infested eyes of toddlers who candidly fix their gaze upon us through our plasma-screens, prompting our pity, or maybe even some action.
Instead what we have seen is a dignified people, jaded and weary from watching the little that they have worked so hard for, wither and die; the water beds reduce and disappear, the soil turn to dust, the crops shrivelled and dried and what remains of their cattle prolonging their own agony and the agony of the hope that they offer their owners by stoically seeking to stave off their final death through starvation; Eking out what remains of the odd tuft of grass, their knobbly haunches and razor-sharp rib cages a testimony to their inevitable doom after months of deprivation.
Yes, it’s hard to get people interested in the piles of bones and skulls, bleached by the intense, furnace-like heat, some with tendrils and other pieces of flesh still clinging to them, when they’re only the bodies of animals.
But these are not just the skeletons of dead animals; rather they are the putrefying carcasses of hope and hard work; yet,in the midst of this Armageddon, the fact that the bodies were piled carefully, a bewildering indication of a sense of tidiness and order that in spite of their suffering, the people here continue to maintain.
Why should this trouble you? And more importantly what can you do to help? Well, let me tell you about the people who I met whose lives are devastated by seeing their crops and cattle wiped out.
The mothers who carefully tend children weakened by hunger and vulnerable to infection, who were themselves drained by their long journeys on foot to the hospital in
El-Wak where the Red Cross is fighting to save lives, the pastoralist farmers who’ve faced terrible decisions over whether or not to slaughter their dying cattle before it’s too late, the children whose hopes and opportunities are quashed through exhaustion, pain and terror.
If one of these children finally breathes its last and dies of hunger and thirst, is this a famine? Well everyday babies and children do surrender to their inevitable deaths. Preventable deaths.
One child dies every five seconds simply from hunger. This is a fact. The World Food & Agriculture Organisation tells us that 6.5 million children a year simply starve to death. And this is just over half of the annual death toll from hunger amounting to some ten million people.
When President John F. Kennedy addressed that the World Food Congress nearly 50 years ago, in 1963 he warned us at the time that “the war against hunger is truly mankind’s war of liberation”. Yet at the time that that he uttered those prophetic words, the death toll from hunger – although horrifically high at 70 million – will be dwarfed if we continue to allow our fellow human beings to starve and perish in the numbers they currently are.
All told some 850 million people are hungry in the world today. This is a holocaust of hunger. These people will not all die. We may not in fact see the tv images that so galvanised us in the mid 1980’s.
But what we can see, and what we must not turn away our eyes from, is the wretchedness of people who once lived in their own homes, produced their own cattle and cultivated their own crops left destitute, hungry and huddled around feeding stations or thronged in shanty shacks waiting for help.
My mission in Kenya was to see first-hand what more we, in the Red Cross, and with the help of the Irish Government, can do to give these people back hope.
I have seen the Red Cross in action on the ground providing medical care, seeds, and water to these people to support them in their struggle for life. I will be reporting back to the Irish Minister of State for Overseas Aid, Conor Lenihan on what I have seen and I look forward to his support and the support of private individuals, commercial enterprises and governments worldwide in helping us in the Red Cross to pull these people away from the abyss of famine that looms.