ADRAnews-0512
23/4/12
8:53 PM
Page 1
Winter 2012
to borrow and prepare food to bring back to her family. It was a walk of survival that would take all day, meaning she couldn’t invest in her own garden or seek out work. Her husband, unable to watch his family slip further into poverty turned to alcohol. He was either drunk or hung over – but numbing the pain only made the problems worse.
Ruth and her family have been hungry for two decades.
Of food and futures The afternoon sun sank towards the hazy Kenyan horizon as Ruth Zulu and her family bagged up yet another meagre harvest of maize. Lifting the sacks onto their backs they knew it wouldn’t be enough. Ruth thought through the scenario, ‘Maybe it will last us three months if we eat just two small meals a day.” Sitting outside her home, surrounded by dust and dry maize Ruth continued to explain how her family had survived through this prolonged drought. But my mind was stuck two sentences back. Still struggling to understand what she had just told me. “This is the last time we had a harvest,” she had said matter-of-factly. My mind raced to make sense of it all the last time Ruth and her family were able to harvest ANY food from their field
was 15 years ago. And yet, here they were, as hosts to me and my questions without any sense of desperation or regret in her words –just the fact that this was life.
My mind catches up with the Swahili flowing from Ruth to my translator. “I’ve been forced into this. I want to be self sufficient.” And with that I realize she’s articulated the simple, unselfish dream for a secure future that is echoed by thousands around her. But it is a dream that has been put on hold. Her children, now numbering eight, have also had to put their dreams on hold. While they could never afford uniforms, they at least had the opportunity to learn, but as the drought worsened they were forced to drop out of school to find and beg for food. “All our neighbours were struggling like us,” Ruth said. “We never got much begging, but we had to try.” And so there were times when they wouldn’t eat - they would often go three days between meals.
Since marrying in 1989 Ruth’s family has, as she put it, “never had enough.” Or, to put it in terms we understand, Ruth and her family have been hungry for more than two decades.
“We would just drink water and sleep,” Ruth said. Illness was common, and without the money to buy a mosquito net the children were often plagued with malaria.
Every day for 20 years Ruth would set out on a 20km trek to her sister’s home
Twenty-three years ago she was married with the dream of raising a healthy,
ADVENTIST DEVELOPMENT AND RELIEF AGENCY AUSTRALIA
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Ruth Zulu and her family would often go for three days without a meal.