.. The Eighteen year old mother said softly to me as she teared amidst her weakness,
"I know they wonder if he'll ever survive.. It is not his first time to be on this bed, and it is not because there's no food in our country, but we cannot afford it.. If we have good food, we will have less sickness, if we feed well, we will be well.."
These were from the words of Fiona, a teenage mother who had her infant bedridden as a result of complications of protein-energy malnutrition (PEM), underweight and kwashiokor. In fact, I would say it this way, he was 'sick of poverty and hunger'.
This happened in 2015, where I was the reporter in an outreach mission to a rural community over in Eastern Africa. We took camp at Kongowe district. The next morning saw us mobilising the children for outreach activities and visiting their hospitals. Tear drops could not be held back as the team only managed with dark shades to hide crying at the sight of many cases clearly affected by malnutrition. With every interview, I was broken, I mean my humanity was pained and my 'inside almost ran out of me' in terror and heartbreak. Poverty is the leading cause of malnutrition, and in itself has been unavoidably implicated as a "socio-economic disease" that plagues many continents and Africa the most. Malnutrition is not mostly caused by eating less quantity as much as it is by poor quality of food. The majority of these people basically used tubers like yams as 70% of their diet, no doubt why kwashiokor and many malnutrition-related diseases were always 'knocking on their door'. Remember Fiona's words, "if we feed well, we will be well".
Of course malnutrition is not a sole cause of morbidity but it plays a major role.
Hinted by my short, fictional but reality-inclined story, strategic war against poverty is a war against malnutrition and hunger. For a solution, Africa must arise and develop within her borders to win against this problem.
-Shalom'Shalom (
(Word count: 343)
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