News Worthy?

Remember when you were little and didn’t want to finish your broccoli? And your parents told you to eat up because there were starving children in Africa?

Calvin is a very good example of the non-broccoli-eating child

I remember one evening, this happened to my older brother, Danny (who was probably about 8 at the time), and he cheekily replied “Well then, we should put this in a box and mail it to them, because I don’t want it.”

Now that I’m in Africa, I am surprised to find that my friends use the same logic to make me finish the greens or ugali. They pull out the “There are starving children…” phrase, except now, instead of being all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, the starving children are here.

So even though I am now here in Africa, where those starving children who would have loved to eat my broccoli live, it is still a sort of farce, a pretense to get your child, or your college-aged co-worker, to clean her plate. All those starving children still seem far away and in the corner of the mind, even in the minds of many Kenyans.

Take a recent copy of the Daily Nation as an example. This newspaper, along with The Standard, are the top news sources in Kenya and very widely read. The front page had the following headlines: TSC Chiefs Losing Jobs in a Huge School Shake-Up, The US Won’t Release Dossier on Mwau, and Borrowers to Pay More as Rates Shoot Up.

I had to flip all the way to page 10 to find a quarter-page article titled Crisis: 10million Face Hunger in East Africa’s Worst Drought. Ten million people. That is 1428 Princeton Universities worth of people. Grad and undergrad. Imagine fourteen thousand twenty-eight Princeton Universities where students which don't have Forbes Brunch or Mathey barbeques or Wawa or even clean water to drink. We complain about the dining hall serving waffles and chicken again while ten million people in East Africa go to sleep with empty stomachs.

Eastern Africa is facing the driest period since 1950-1951. Successive rains have failed, which has resulting in failed harvests, dying livestock and dying livelihoods. Large parts of Northern Kenya and Somalia are in the “emergency category,” one phase before famine. In some parts of Northern Kenya, one in three children is malnourished. Families who can eat one meal per day are the lucky ones.  And even with all the hunger in the Northern country, thousands of people are fleeing into Kenya from Somalia for hunger-related reasons. The population of Dadaab refugee camp on the border of Kenya and Somali rose by 18,000 people in just two weeks and now has a population over 380,000, even though it was intended to have a capacity of just 90,000, less than a quarter of its current capacity.

Map from World Concern Humanitarian Aid
detailing the extent of the food crisis in East Africa

It is not just the farmers and pastoralists in drought-stricken areas who are feeling the hunger pangs. In the past twelve months, food prices have risen 22.5%. Just a few weeks ago, there were unga (flour) demonstrations, as people took to the streets to demand this staple food be subsidized. Families can only afford enough unga for one meal per day and children go to hungry, scrounging around for mangos on the way school to fill their stomachs. Teachers have commented that hunger is negatively affecting their students’ performance and they worry over what will happen when mangos go out of season.

Yet here in the business class of Mombasa, this suffering seems far away. Sure, my co-worker, Jane, will click her tongue and mutter “so sad” as pictures of cattle which have starved to death and hungry children flicker across the screen, but the topic quickly passes as the news switches to MPs not paying their taxes.

If I had been in the US, it is unlikely I would have heard anything about these terrible droughts and starvation conditions. Though this may partly be due to my lack of any proper news source when I am away from my news-devouring roommate, Tara (who is amazingly writing for Times Magazine this summer), it is also a sad result of the regularity of this story. Even here in Kenya, or perhaps, especially here in Kenya, hunger and starvation don’t make the front page because they are so habitual. It is not news or a breaking story; it is life. And it is a part of life which seems to be is out of the control of the everyday Kenyan. Articles reporting on the hunger crisis mention the UN and foreign NGOs, like UK-based Save the Children, as sources of foreign aid which need to step up their act and save people. The problem of feeding their people may be beyond the scope of Kenyan government’s ability. Yet if they do not seem to make the effort to save their people and to put this news on the front page, how will the rest of the world respond? When starvation doesn’t make the headlines or make citizens take action when it is just kilometers away, how will we ever attain what is beginning to seem like an impossible dream of ending world hunger?