I just finished my Food Security conference in Bamako and my two villagers enjoyed a day in town before heading home to Sebanso on Sunday. I am staying in San until Monday so I can go to market day here due to my inability to go to my own market because our road floods each time the rain comes.
The conference was in Bambara entirely and thus the few volunteers there attended some alternative sessions and in our down time enjoyed the wire access we so rarely get to enjoy. A woman working for the CDC in Atlanta, Dr. Mary Alleman, came to speak to us on some of the most common preventable diseases present in Mali with particular emphasis on Polio. A large part of my job as a volunteer is to share my experiences with family and friends while in country in an attempt to raise awareness of our country of service, thus, I’m writing this email primarily to inform you all about some issues present in Mali.
Just a few years ago there were no cases of Polio in West Africa and today there are many spreading north/west from Nigeria. Several years ago rumors of female infertility caused by receiving the polio vaccine circulated through Nigeria, so today a significant proportion of the worlds cases of polio are found there (India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are the other endemic countries). The first case of reported polio in Senegal in many years occurred in January 2010 and Mali has had 2 new cases reported in both 2009 and 2010 and expected to grow quickly without immediate prevention and treatment intervention. Small Pox is the only disease to be completely eradicated in the world and polio was very close until recently. With these new cases surfacing the World Health Organization, Center for Disease Control, and Ministries of Health are all working hard to eliminate the disease and hoping to utilize PC volunteers to help spread the information and help ensure all the children are vaccinated. There are specific weekends were the local CSCOM (bruce doctors office) relays (kind of like a nurse) go door to door and vaccinate the children 5 and under in each house in their respective communes and use a permanent marker to color the child’s pinky nail as an identifier that they’ve received the vaccine. This is where we as volunteers can be particularly effective. We have developed a relationship with our communities and can find the kids without the marked pinky and have their parent’s get them vaccinated. These campaigns occur every few months since the first occurrence of polio in Mali in 2008 and during these campaigns the children receive the vaccine for free.
As our conference pertained to Food Security and the starting of committees and associations we have learned some interesting stats during our sessions. For starters, there are 1 billion hungry people in the world and in Sub-Saharan Africa one in every three people is chronically hungry. I’m hard pressed to find a more important issue facing Mali than Food Security. I can truly not imagine having to reduce my meals to one a day in an attempt to make it through hungry season or being in fear that I’m not going to have enough money to buy food for the week.
Food Security is a global problem and defined by a community’s accessibility of food in a community and for those people in the community to have adequate access to it. This includes quality of food and the nutritious value of that food. Nutritious food is difficult to come by even during cold season which is when most of the garden produce is available in market not to mention the other 10 months of the year when produce is exponentially more expensive and harder to find. When millet is the staple of your diet and the only regular sources of protein are in dried fish (one of the most horrid smells in market) you can imagine the difficulties in eating a balanced diet…scratch that, the impossibility of eating a balanced diet. I heard an interesting theory on one of the many reasons Mali and other West African countries continue to be unable to develop which essentially comes to the conclusion that sorghum is the only indigenous crop in Mali and all the millet, corn, beans, etc that are grown have been brought in from outside.
This is just the tip of the ice berg relating to Food Security and the possibilities and also the dangers of not addressing the problem. In theory, upon my return to site my villagers will have some ideas on how to protect the village in saving food and increasing production, etc. Hopefully I’ll have some positive updates for you in a few weeks.
Love,
Cait
