Mennonite
Central
Committee

MCC helps to fight hunger in northern Burundi

Emily Will
August 10, 2006

Kirundo Province, Burundi — Esperance Mukashama sits on the ground in front of her mud-brick house in rural northern Burundi. With a 2-week-old baby at her breast and a listless 5-year-old at her side, Mukashama shells beans, splitting pods pulled from the family's field.

A few cups of beans is all Mukashama and her family will eat today. They will be lucky to have a similar meal tomorrow.

Mukashama, in her early 30s, thinks they're losing this waiting game. After four years of drought, Mukashama fears that she and her six children will die before new crops grow or sufficient food aid arrives.

Famine has hit northern Burundi, and Mukashama and her neighbors watch daily as their energy evaporates and their bodies shrink. They watch their neighbors die. Mukashama points to a nearby home. "Four people died there," she says. "They got sick and because they were weak and had no food, they died within two to three days." She points to other homes and ticks off the names of those who have died in each of them.

Many believe that the famine in northern Burundi is related to deforestation that has ravaged the region since the early 1990s. MCC is responding to this crisis by helping to meet immediate and longer-term needs.

MCC recently shipped 168,000 pounds of canned turkey from Ephrata, Pa., to Burundi. An MCC partner organization, Help Channel Burundi, is distributing the turkey to people in northern Burundi as part of a food-for-work project.

Through the project, local people are planting 400,000 trees in a 600-acre area. Organizers hope that reforestation will increase water supplies for farmers in the region.

When Mukashama married in the late 1980s, the area was forested and the couple's fields were fertile and productive. They were self-sufficient and able to send their children to school, she says. Known for its beans and sorghum, the region helped supply the rest of Burundi with these staples. A rapid demise of the area's forests began in the 1990s. After civil war broke out in 1991, the government felled trees to destroy shelter for rebels. People cut trees for fuel and to create pasture for cows.

Throughout the 1990s, Africa as a continent experienced the highest rates of deforestation in the world. Within Africa, Burundi placed first in deforestation—an incredible 9 percent annually, according to figures supplied by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. This was 45 times higher than the 0.2 percent annual rate of global deforestation in the 1990s.

In northern Burundi, deforestation has affected agriculture in two major ways. Without trees that add moisture to the atmosphere, it has rained less, prolonging the dry season. When it does rain, the water washes topsoil from the denuded areas.

In nearby Vumbi district, 47-year-old Sophie Nkankuyo says she and her neighbors hoped and prayed for an end to the interminable dry season, believing their hunger would end. But when rains finally came, the water washed away most of their newly planted seedlings—and dashed their hopes.

Viewing the world from her corner of Burundi, Nkankuyo says she and her neighbors are witnessing the biblical apocalypse. "We have no reason to think our children will outlive us, the parents," she says.

Nkankuyo and her husband have already lost three of their nine children. The family still has some bananas and cassava growing in their field. But hungry people come at night and help themselves. A neighbor was killed when he confronted someone cutting bananas from one of his trees.

Community leader Protais Nshimirimana, 50, believes that few individuals in the district have escaped hunger—he says maybe one out of a hundred or a thousand.

Local government officials more conservatively put the figure for Kirundo at 50 percent, or 250,000 of the province's half million inhabitants. Nationwide, an estimated 1.8 million Burundians are threatened with starvation.

Some try to survive on what family members who go to work in neighboring Rwanda or other parts of Burundi can bring back. Mukashama's husband, for example, often crosses into Rwanda to work as an agricultural laborer. Although he earns a pittance, he was able to bring food to his family during his wife's latest pregnancy, and Mukashama credits her baby's live birth to this assistance.

Mukashama, Nkankuyo and their neighbors in Kirundo have reached the point where their thoughts are consumed with finding the next plate of food, they say. Some people are dismantling their dwellings, selling the metal roofing or even the timbers in order to purchase food for another day or two. Nkankuyo fingers her bright shawl and says she may soon be willing to exchange it for a meal.

 

Emily Will is a freelance writer in Tucson, Arizona.