by Nicholas Baldry
I have been watching what I eat of late. My concerns about my own food intake have revolved around excess. Excess salt, excess sugar, excess fat, excess calories, in short an excess of just about everything. Of course I can control this by making the right choices when buying food and any issues with my own diet are the result of my own choices. With a plentiful variety of food, both healthy and unhealthy available at affordable prices at the local supermarket, my dietary intake is completely within my control.
In comparison the diet in Niger is, at the best of times, repetitive. A diet largely consisting of milk and cereals such as millet or sorghum made into a porridge, as well as some starchy roots doesn’t offer a lot nutrition, and protein from meat is only available on special occasions with livestock being too valuable to slaughter on a regular basis. When fruits and vegetables are available, they are usually prohibitively expensive for the poorest families. Beyond that there is the primary issue that comes with collecting water for communities without a well – the lack of cleanliness of the water itself.
A lack of proper food impacts both physical and mental development in youngsters and productivity in adults. Stunted growth amongst children is alarmingly prevalent in Niger with some estimates suggesting that about half of under-five’s suffer from this problem.
| {Wells Bring Hope’s Partner World Vision Assists with Famine Relief} |
A real cause for alarm is that the diet described above is the diet available in good years. A poor rainy season in late 2011 lead to failed harvests in 2012. This produced what was variously called a lean season (which is a staggering understatement), nutritional crisis, or outright famine in the Sahel region. Whatever you want to call it, the result of such poor conditions is a diet that consists of anything the stomach can hold. In the past this has meant acacia leaves, weeds, and anything else that will stem the feeling of hunger. Adults can barely survive on this diet, but the ones who suffer most are children. In need of nutrients such as zinc, iron, magnesium and protein that this diet lacks, thousands of young children were left in need of treatment for acute malnutrition and too many children didn’t even get that.
And I worry about my diet.
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| {photo by Ida Harding} |
As part of Wells Bring Hope’s commitment to help villages for at least 15 years after drilling a well, we teach techniques like drip farming. This allows the efficient use of ‘grey water,’ which is wastewater* from domestic activities such as laundry, dishwashing and so on, to help grow vegetables that would otherwise not be available to villagers. These vegetables add much-needed nutrients to the regular diet, and any excess produce can be sold, substantially increasing the household income. Nutritional deficiencies have for too long been a fact of life for people living in Niger, with access to a well and updated farming techniques, a little water can go a long way to change this.
*Not that any water can be termed waste when it as scarce as it is in rural Niger, that is why recycling it for irrigation is so crucial.
