I remember when I was making plans to go off to Grad School. There was no way that I could take either of my pugs with me to live in the school’s housing. My mother, having a dog of her own, issued an ultimatum to me. “Jennifer, I can only take one more dog. You’ll have to choose one of them to give away.” I was heartbroken, but I knew my mother was serious. I could hear it in her voice.
Out in the fields when I was walking Joey and Petey, I would look at one sad face to the other (at least they looked sad to me), and I would ask myself, “Which will it be? Will it be Joey, or Petey?” Every time I thought I had it figured out, I would break down and think, “I can’t possibly give HIM up!” Back and forth I would go. I vacillated so long that it was time for me to head to school, and I hadn’t done a thing about finding a new home for one of those dogs. In the end, Dad came to the rescue, and cared for my two dogs while I was gone. Mom didn’t seem to mind, but she didn’t let me forget that I had pulled “a fast one.”
Today we learned about something called, "Survival Strategy." This is very real and very sad.
Around the months of April through June, life gets very hard here in Senegal. The crops have been harvested the October before, and all the profit has been spent on food. Merchants who have bought up the grains that were harvested now break out their purchases to resell to the people who are easy prey. They have had to sell their harvest to live, have had to spend the money on necessities, and now what do they do?
There are several "Survival Strategies" they adopt to try to make it through desperate times.
The first stage is to skip a meal. Parents may ask an older teen to skip breakfast and spread out the food among younger siblings. Then more family members may go without food as the supply becomes skimpier and skimpier.
The second stage is for the parents to choose a child--typically the oldest girl because the boys are seen as more valuable, to leave the home and go into a big near by city like Dakar and find a job as an au pair, housekeeper, whatever menial unskilled job she can find. The point is to earn money and send some home to her hungry family. This leaves the girl very vulnerable to sexual preditors, sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention the fact that she was taken away from an education in order to work.
The third stage is to sell property, and this is the most severe tactic the family resorts to. It may start by selling a chicken, then a goat. Finally, a family will sell its horse or plow--the very means by which they earn a living in agriculture. The family will start the following year "in the hole" having somehow to repurchase tools to continue working.
We have seen how World Vision has entered villages practicing these Survival Strategies, and many residents have told us with their own words how life has changed for them. With new techniques and life skills, World Vision has taught them how to be more productive farmers with the drip irrigation system, for example. They are producing more crops, and are avoiding the nasty price gouging inflicted on them by greedy merchants. This is helping to eliminate the painful effects of the three survival strategies I described. People are eating, girls are staying in school, and villages are beginning to prosper because people care enough to give to World Vision through Child Sponsorship.
If I had trouble deciding which of my sweet pugs to give away, imagine how it must be for these parents sending children into a big city like Dakar?
No comments:
Post a Comment