Wednesday I am heading to Hamada-Gaza, a town far north of Gamboula along some very horrible roads. I think it takes a day to get there; that is if the bridges are passable and it isn’t raining. I will be in the company of five staff from the Gamboula Hospital who will be going to assess the health and nutrition situation which, by all accounts so far, is not at all good.
Diamonds may be a woman’s best friend in North America, but here, they result in famine and hardship. Men, seduced by the prospect of striking it rich by finding a large cache of diamonds hidden beneath the ground, strike out into the bush to dig large pits and sift the soil looking for diamonds. The problem is that it is much like playing the lottery, with about as equal odds of winning big. You may win two dollars here, ten dollars there, but not enough to feed your family for more than a few days. In the meantime, if your wife is not digging beside you, she is laboring in the family fields without her co-laborer (her husband) and likely her older sons are also absent. Thus, when the husband comes home empty handed, not having held the winning lottery ticket, instead of losing a dollar or two a week playing the lotto, the family suffers much greater losses in the form of malnourished, diseased and dead children. Without enough food to eat from the family garden, or enough money to buy food or medicines in the market, families suffer to the point of death.
This has been the case in Hamada-Gaza, a village whose woes are augmented by a lack of roads that can support large vehicles (such as supply trucks or bush taxis), an overall drop in diamond demand and prices, increased food prices and decreased food production. It is a recipe for disaster. The team from the hospital will be going to help assess the severity of the situation, teach the local health clinic about how to ameliorate some of the worst cases with specially formulated milk and we hope to bring an empty car to bring the most urgent cases back to the hospital. I hope to explore the state of agriculture in the area, assess the availability of seed and see how CEFA could be of help. I will be glad to have Clarisse with me and I know, as hard as it will be to see starvation, it is a necessary part of my time and usefulness here.
