Living on the edge of existence
Justin Byworth, World Vision UK’s Chief Executive, continues to blog from Niger where the population faces a growing food crisis.
Day 5, Komabangou and Sirba
It has been said that a million different people live in a million different worlds. Today, in Komabangou, I got a glimpse of a world so different, so harsh, that it was more like being transported to another planet.
As my colleague Georgina put it: “At pretty much the hardest place on earth, children pound rocks to dust for pennies”. A dust-covered people where fathers work themselves to an early grave just so their children can eat.
In this place, with no water, it is the traces of gold in the rocks beneath the desert surface that are the people’s lifeline. But to get this out of the ground means facing hazards not seen in the UK for two centuries and living on the edge of existence for food, water and health.
World Vision is there helping children and their mothers and fathers cling on to that existence and in time to bring real, lasting change to these communities.
Knowing the dangers
Meeting Abdou Kadri – a 35-year-old father of four, including ten-year-old Amadou who is sponsored by a caring World Vision supporter in the UK – was the most dramatic and unexpected encounter I have had here in Niger.
As we walked towards a group of men amidst piles of rocks and sand, I realised there were scores of holes in the ground. Hand-dug and just two or three feet across, I peered down into the dark deep below and heard the steady thud of digging.
In answer to my question of how deep these most basic of mine shafts was, one man called down below and we struck up conversation with Kadri – unseen over 50 feet below. He had been down there for over four hours but told us he was just getting going for the day. When he heard there was a visitor from the UK he said: “I’m coming up, I’d like to meet him”. Seeing him emerge minutes later, climbing up the most fragile of footholds inside the hole, and beam a huge smile at me as he wiped his face clean was a surreal, unforgettable moment.
Kadri told me: “I don’t like this work. I’m only doing it so that my family don’t go hungry”. He knows the dangers well and that he probably has just a few years life ahead of him. Life expectancy of those working here is just 45.
That’s my age and as I sat next to him, with our legs over the side of the hole, sharing conversation about the four children we both have. I felt a strong sense of connection with him and of how different our lives are simply because of where we were born.
“I get pains in my body”
Just a mile or two across the desert scrub we met the younger generation who pound the rocks dug out by Kadri and his friends into the dust that is then sifted for gold traces. Ten or so young men sit under a scrap of shade hammering down large metal pestles onto the rocks.
It feels overwhelming – the sun beating down, the constant sound and clouds of dust that fill the air and cover everything. 19 year old Hama Hamidou tells me: “It’s very difficult work and sometimes I get pains in my body, but it’s my only source of income”. He started at just 16 and the contrast with my 20 year old son Joshua’s last 3 years at university and school couldn’t be starker.
Younger still is 13 year old Ibrahim, one of many boys who runs back and forth with supplies for those involved in the mining. World Vision has been working here for the last three years and it’s good to hear that Ibrahim is in school and to see other teenage boys at the youth centre we established, where they’ve learnt carpentry and other skills to equip them with a trade that might give them another route than the dangerous gold mining.
Battle to survive
A stone’s throw away is Komabangou’s health centre, crowded with mothers and babies all attending a World Vision supported nutrition clinic. In such a harsh part of one of the poorest countries in the world, many children face an uphill battle to survive long enough to even have the choice between gold mining and another path in life.
Our work with the health centre is changing that. Surrounded by the noise of crying babies as they’re weighed, measured and arm measurements checked, I heard from Dr Abdou Karim that while malnutrition is on the rise – from 364 in 2010 to 541 in 2011- that only two of these children have died during that time. Following the failed harvest, Dr Karin says: “In 2012 malnutrition is certain to rise, but we can cope as long as we get the support. We have the staff, the material, the system – it’s working”.
The consequences of not getting the support are literally life and death for children like Magizdo. She is two years old, severely malnourished and has malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea. An undoubtedly lethal cocktail had her mother Ramatou not brought her here where she gets therapeutic feeding – the highly nutritious ‘plumpy nut’, oral rehydration, soap and drugs to treat the malaria and pneumonia. The trained local village health worker will monitor and support Ramatou and Magizdou closely over the days ahead and Dr Karim is confident that “she’ll survive and should recover well, they got here in time”. Ramatou, at 26 already a widow with four children, is relieved: “I am so happy because I see my daughter’s health is improving”.
A different world
There’s much more to tell from today; time with children in another Komabongou village, a visit to a confident, go-getting community in neighbouring Sirba and eventful ferry rides over the Niger river. This will have to wait until a much needed rest day. For now, it’s the white dust-covered faces of the children in Komabongou and the thought of Kadri waking up to another day down a dark, deep and dangerous hole in the ground that I will carry with me, a world away even from Niamey (one of the least sophisticated capital cities I’ve seen), and a whole other universe from life back home in the UK.