Supporter: Bob Newell

Niamey, Niger – As the news spreads about drought and famine in East Africa, another potential crisis is emerging in West Africa - a persistent hunger that may not be addressed until it is too late.

Every year, in towns and villages across Africa, there is a season just prior to harvesting known as the “hunger season.” These are lean months when all the food from the previous harvest has been consumed, productive assets are being sold to buy whatever food is available, and the next harvest is still weeks or months away. It is a period when families’ food reserves are gone or dangerously low. And it happens every year.

But what happens if the hunger season keeps its captives building upon debts accumulated from previous years?

Kololo is a small village on the southern edge of the Sahara desert, in Niger. You won’t find it on a map. It has a population of three or four hundred, nearly all of them women and children. The men are gone, searching for work in other parts of West Africa.

For the second year in a row, the harvest was too poor to sustain the families in the village. And even with the men sending money home, there isn’t enough food to go around. Consequently, a great many kids in this and other nearby villages are malnourished.

Millet, a grain Americans know as birdseed, is the staple food in this area. It’s not the most nutritious crop, but it will grow in sand, which is about all the soil there is in this region. The crop didn’t entirely fail last year, but it was patchy enough that few villages will get through the year without help, to say nothing of the next year and the year after that.

In the Filingué district of Niger, I visited projects of the aid agency Mercy Corps, which has provided emergency nutritional assistance to more than 9,000 malnourished kids between the ages of six months and five years. It seems like a good start, but it is just the tip of the iceberg in a country where 3.8 million people are identified as “undernourished” and nearly a quarter of the population needs food aid.

The group’s rural feeding programme is simple. Word gets out about the feeding centers and mothers from the surrounding area come. They bring their undernourished kids and receive rations of enriched cereal mix or peanut protein. The kids are weighed and measured so they can be evaluated against well-established norms. Every week the process is repeated, with all steps being recorded in a little booklet that the mother must bring, though she probably can’t read it. The children usually recover relatively quickly and “graduate” out of the programme.

Nonetheless, the life here is hard and the stories of these mothers are heart rending. Many don’t have enough breast milk, due to their own malnourishment. Nearly all have too many mouths to feed. One woman I spoke to walked two days each way (about 30 miles) under the Saharan sun to have her baby weighed and get rations. There are no roads, no other means of transport unless you’re wealthy enough to afford a donkey, in which case you probably don’t need the help anyhow.

Mercy Corps’ has another feeding programme is located in the capital of Niamey, where it was thought there was no malnutrition. It has registered over 1,100 kids in just 2 1/2 weeks. Couple that with the thousands we’ve seen further north where the crop failures were more severe, and then consider that the next harvest is still six months away. It is not hard to see which way the trend is going: hunger again for another season.

To keep Niger from entering a crisis again is to act now to intervene early, avoiding the fate of millions of people in Kenya and Somalia who currently face extreme food insecurity.

Congress has the opportunity to provide much-needed assistance to this hungry region by fully funding President Bush's £210 million request for emergency food aid. It won't be enough to meet current needs nor will it provide the much need longer-term assistance. But it is a step in the right direction – and more than we did last year.

Robert Newell is an attorney in Portland and chairman of the board of Mercy Corps, an international aid agency.

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Bosnia is not a country - it is a buffer zone between Serbia and the rest of the Balkans. Before the war, the majority of the population was Muslim, which, in this part of the world, is somehow perversely considered a nationality or an ethnic group. In fact, the Muslims here are either Croats or Serbs, but by being Muslim they lose that identity.

Mercy Corps' work here has gone on for years and has focused on repatriating refugees and rebuilding their houses. Identifying those who are likely to return and to succeed is a lengthy and detailed process. Imagine being driven from your home under threat of death and coming back to live with those who issued the threats.

We met a woman named Stana who is a Bosnian Serb living in a village called Bratovac. A friend of hers, Zahneba, was a Muslim living in the same village. Zahneba's husband was taken away by Serbs in the village and never returned. Zahneba's response was to call Stana and form a women's association to begin the process of reconciliation. The two worked together on all sorts of projects and ultimately won an award for courage from a UN agency. Zahneba even insisted on including in one economic development project the man who took her husband away.

In the next village, Srebrenica, we stopped at the memorial that President Clinton dedicated about a week ago. Mass graves have been found all over this area and they are at work now trying to identify the thousands of bodies that have been exhumed. There was no one at the memorial except for two gravediggers. After staring at row after row of relatively new graves, I spoke to one of the men to ask if he knew any of the dead. He paused, looked over his shoulder to survey the scene and slowly turned and said "90 percent." How does one bear that kind of pain without hatred?

The Serbs laid siege to Srebrenica, which sits at the bottom of a narrow mountain valley, and eventually drove the Muslim inhabitants out. They rounded up most of the men and boys and killed them. The women went to concentration camps where they were tortured and raped. The aim was to so humiliate and frighten the Muslims that they would never return. The Serbs also went to each and every Muslim house, not just in the village, but throughout the surrounding mountains, and burned them so that they would be uninhabitable.

Although the Dayton Accords put an end to this part of the war, there has been no acceptance of responsibility or apology by Serbia. Indeed, the boundary established in Dayton is not recognized by most Serbs, though it is for the time being by Serbia the country. Instead, there is an area along the northern and eastern borders of Bosnia which is called Republica Serbska and is announced as such by prominent signs throughout the area.

There is no sense of nationhood in Bosnia. Before the war, people considered themselves Yugoslavians. Now, they are a population that appears to be clinically depressed. The economy is in terrible shape with few prospects of improvement. Mercy Corps is doing small-scale economic development projects, but it will take more than that to get this "country" moving again.

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Afghanistan, especially northern Afghanistan, is by far the most exotic place I have ever seen.

I flew to Taloqan from Kabul. It is in the north, about 60 km. east of Kunduz and not far from the Tajikistan border. The pilots were an American and a Canadian. We flew over the Hindu Kush, which, like the Tien Shan, are some very spectacular mountains.

When we landed there, the runway was just dirt and there was literally nothing else there except the Mercy Corps vehicle and some people waiting to get on to go to the next town. There was a wind sock, but no buildings - only a bombed out tank.

The ride into town was out of another century. It could easily have been from 1,000 years ago with virtually no change. Men and boys on donkeys, women (though not many of them) in burkhas and mud wall construction. The homes here are built against the mud walls of the perimeter and the yard-garden is in the centre of the compound. Dust is everywhere.

The town has one paved street, which doesn't even go to the end of the town and lots of activity. There is no electricity, though there are some generators. Most of the men wear turbans and all wear the traditional shalvar kameez (long shirt and pants). Some wear the roll up hats like you've seen on TV and some just the common Muslim skullcap. There is no western dress.

There are occasional remains of tanks and trucks along the way, and the road is in pretty bad shape because of mortar shells and tank traffic. From our vantage point, just by turning around to the hillside, we could see the site of a "quarry" where men chip out flat rocks for transport to the location of various infrastructure projects Mercy Corps carries out such as bridges, irrigation canals and the like. It is very hard work.

We also visited a dam project designed to provide a significant area with water for the canals that have been in disrepair for over 25 years. The project had to be stopped at one point because the community was not cleaning out the canals as agreed. They kept making excuses, and only when Mercy Corps suspended work on the dam did they get out the shovels.

The news we get about Afghanistan modernizing certainly does not apply to the north. All women wear burkhas, though out in the country they will sometimes pull them back from their faces if they think no one is around. I'm told that in the south, women still don't go out in public at all. In Kabul, there is more of a mixture, but at least 50 percent of the women I've seen in public wear burkhas.

This is an extremely conservative, almost medieval society. There seems to be little sense of nationhood and it is not clear to me that there is any real chance that one government can control the whole country. Loyalties are local and tribal, and it will be a long time before this is a nation as we define that term.

That said, I've seen some interesting work. I sat in on an interview of three women (all wearing burkhas, but who allowed me to see, though not photograph, their faces) who were applying for loans. They have no collateral, so they will each be responsible as a group and as individuals for all three loans. They will use the money (about £60) to finance a small business. I met one woman who already had such a loan who used it to buy chickpeas, clean them and resell them. She had been doing that for wages, but the loan allowed her to become independent and increased her income by about 67 percent (up to $2 per day). She also created a couple of jobs for others in the process.

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