Hunger Is A Daily Companion In Somalia

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World Food Day,16 October:"Food prices - from crisis to stability".

Can you believe that there is enough food in the world for everyone !!. 

Then why there is famine in Somalia!!

Why so many people die because of shortage of food !!

Famine should be a Crime Against Humanity. 

World Food Day, 16 October 2011

This year theme is 

 "Food prices - from crisis to stability".

Food prices - from crisis to stability

Price swings, upswings in particular, represent a major threat to food security in developing countries. Hardest-hit are the poor. According to the World Bank, in 2010-2011 rising food costs pushed nearly 70 million people into extreme poverty.

“FOOD PRICES – FROM CRISIS TO STABILITY” has been chosen as this year’s World Food Day theme to shed some light on this trend and what can be done to mitigate its impact on the most vulnerable.

On World Food Day 2011, let us look seriously at what causes swings in food prices, and do what needs to be done to reduce their impact on the weakest members of global society. (source)

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Poverty Tells Many Stories

Source 

Poverty is a Shame.

A week ago, i was writing a post about poverty but then i decided against posting it, it was very harsh. But this topic needs people to be harsh.

Anyway, Manal's comment urged me to write again. Maybe someone will listen.

Unlike some other topics, this one can be very personal to me, cuz we were poor. Sometimes we couldn't find 10 Saudi riyal-3.75 dollars- in our house. My father worked once a month to bring 300 riyal-about 75 dollar- and do nothing the rest of it.

For a family of 6 children and their parents. It was nothing. We were saved more humiliation because we lived in our grandfather's building. But everyone was sure to make us understand that GIFT and how a huge burden we were.

I don't know what might happen if we have to pay for rent, too.

My mother used to borrow money from people and her sister. She never let us know how poor we were. When most of us grow up corrupted, everyone blames her for the way she raised us. People forget that when you poor, you only think of how to provide money for your kids.

Go on and read how poverty affect people and their morality. Poverty affects all kinds of people's lives.

When we were kids, i don't remember asking for something and didn't get it, i didn't know we were poor . But i do remember that she would go borrow money for me and my sister to buy the books and the clothes we need .

Now things are better. Tough but way better. Better because i work and have my own salary, tough because we are still 5 and i am the only breadwinner of the house. Life is getting tough and everything is becoming crazy expensive. Thanks to Allah i have my work to support us, but i remember once when my mother commented after watching people buying stuff for the Eid " what about those unemployed ladies, who will buy them any thing". I know that she remember her self and how tough is it.

I know that here in Saudi Arabia we have a society issue with poverty. We recognized it but we don't know how to handle it. Lots of social idea affect our ways of life that pull us towards poverty and we can not do a thing about them. But if we start having the courage to change them , maybe things will be different. Maybe not becoming the filthy rich but you won't be the poor one, too .

We are a consuming society. Artificial things drives us mad.

A city like my city -Medina- which is not that big has more than twenty shopping centers. And the funny thing is that you will find the same stores in all of these centers.

We go crazy with brands. I was one of them especially with shoes and bags, i have huge number of them with different colors and shapes. They cost me lots and lots of money. And if it was not for the problems we are facing right now, i don't think i would have stopped. If i didn't buy a new thing for about three months, i consider that is a very long time and a sacrifice on my part !!! . And i look at my wardrobe with anger cuz i can not find a thing to wear.

We go crazy with sales and pay ever more -because we have what people call a false sale - .

Imagine the money spending here and imagine how much we can prevent ourselves from stepping one step close to poverty.

Our love and worship for artificial things goes to life itself.

Building houses , the biggest and most important rooms must be the guests rooms. Sometimes we have three to four rooms for guests only. And they have to be decorated and furnished with the most expensive and beautiful furniture. We need big houses because of this.

Imagine the amount of money we are going to save -or even give to the poor- if we build our houses for US not our GUESTS. An expert said last week that we can built a house this way with about 300,000 Saudi riyal. The cheapest house you can find is 850000 SR, and the bank will take a similar amount of that. So about 1700000 for a house !!!!

and it does not come with furniture :)

We take TOO much care of our kids that they grow up so dependent.

Your sons and daughters will have the best clothes no matter what- i know how parents feel towards their kids but sometimes we spoil them instead of parenting them- .

At school the students will have the best shoes and bags -i can see it at my school with girls i know how poor their parents are-.

There is no lessons about the importance of money and how hard it's to get it. There is a daily lecture from me to my students about the fallen- because they are still work but fall of the desk and they didn't pick them up- pencils and pens and that are new but they didn't get it back, the fountain pens that are not locked which may let it dry even quicker, about the half full bottles of water they bought and won't take home with them because their friends will laugh at them if they did, the half eaten sandwiches, they hate me because of my daily reminder. But i know how poor most of them and they need to realize the importance of small things.

There is a tendency that we don't want our kids to feel lesser than their peers. It's not because we feel sorry for them but we don't want people to know we are poor. Poverty is a shame.

If our kids didn't happen to be smart enough at school- and ALL our kids must be number one- or didn't get good grades. Then they- our kids- decided to attend a private school -for better grades not better schooling and that's another topic- and my parents shall pay, no matter what.

Or else-else could be crying, stop eating,locking our selves, have no respect to our parents, decided not to go to school- and best of all if the parents didn't apply then they will simply fail themselves by not participating in classes or at exams. Then the poor parents will have to borrow money and enroll them in a private school, according to the parents they want their kids to have a future,. And the funny and sad thing is that these students will have the same grades or even worse at the private schools and then have to be back to public schools.

One of my colleagues is a widow, her husbands's salary is very little and yet she decided to build a house for her family. She has 5 kids. None of them is doing OK at school and with all her problems and how she is trying to have a house for her kids, her biggest daughter who left school to go to a private one and the poor mother have to pay insisted on having an engagement party few months ago- which failed by the way- and now the one who is studying at our school insisting that she will go to a private school next year and that her mother will pay !!! .

When her mother talked to me about it, i told her to explain that they can not afford it but she seems helpless . It's the way we raise our kids.

Let's forget about girls. The biggest problems is with our sons. Because he or they-if they are are more than one boys and oh how much we love boys- have to have a car - the brand will go with how much money you have-, and they have to have cell phones.

Why they are the biggest problem ? because men have way better chances of having any jobs, even the worse or the less paid. But no way we are going to let them go and find themselves a job and help with the family. Most will say that they don't want them to be distracted from their school, but hell if they are doing any good at school, .

Plus it's a shame if you would ask your sons and daughters to pay for electricity or water or grocery.

Our kids will live with us after finishing high school being unemployed and still require his/her parents to give them money. And if he is 25 and still no work, it's OK if we find him a wife because he is in the right age, we will pay for the marriage and it's a disaster. Then it's OK to pay for his life, kids and wife.

Remember that big house we HAVE to build a few paragraphs up !!! .

Now , how many sons do you have ? according to their number, you have to build flats for them. Because come on, we can not leave them with out a future or a place to live when they are unemployed and married or employed and married. why pay when Daddy and Mommy can save us the trouble !!!

Hello, all the above are not away from the topic -poverty-.

All of the above is why we are poor.

Tell me what do you think of this lady and her family.

There is a nice lady whose daughter studies at school- you can not see the girl without the finest makeup and the best hair , plus the good shoe and bag, I even saw her with a cell phone once- , The girl has very low grades, and she won't even try the least to do any good. I saw her mother once and twice at school and i thought she was coming to check on her daughter.

Little did i know !!! .

The mother has started to sell some food at the school. She would make some food and sell it to teachers- i knew then from other sources that she used to come to school because someone used to give her money and they advice her to cook and sell instead of asking for money-.

I had a beautiful conversation with her last time, she told me that she have five kids-two girls and three boys-. The eldest girl who i met before not knowing that this is her mother have finished school but was not lucky in finding a job or going to college.

She took some computer lessons to find a work but it was not any help-the mother had to borrow the money they paid to the instructor-.

The three boys-or men actually- all finished their school. And what are they doing now ??

Sleeping at home. Because ?

They don't want to work as security guards !!! .

Well, what do you expect when you have no degree !!!. Those with the highest degrees can not find proper jobs !!!

And of course they ask for money and their phone is dead for about two months and they wanted it back.

I asked here why didn't she work at the women centers to sell her food there so she would have a steady job and here comes the other shock !!

Her husband -who works as a guard and receives only 3000 SR for 7 people- refused and said that it's a shame !!!

and yes a working woman or a woman who help her husband can be a problem for some people.

She is so sweet and every time she came to school hoping for some money .

here is the problem, no body buys a thing -only a two or three buy with about 10 maximum-.

So every time i collect the rest and buy them from her. She knows that i am trying to help her and every time she told me that she can not let me do that every time, that's it's not fair.

I keep assuring her that it's OK and that i want to do so. She leaves determining not to come back, but the she keeps coming back and if she didn't find me, she will look for me everywhere to ask me if i want to buy anything.

It's obvious how much she needs the money-it's not a lot , something like 150 or less SR-. Last week, she called me to ask if she can come to school -because of the exams-. She knows no one buy a thing but she keeps coming, those few riyals means a lot to her and can help with something.

What's frustrate me is that everyone -except a very few -keep ignoring her.

I told them last time that they don't have to take that food with them, they can give it to those who don't have food. And this way we help more than one , but people don't listen!!!.

That's what i do mostly, i divide the food into portions and give it to the workers around the school and sometimes gives the sweets to my friends to give them to their children.

I hope that they do listen soon. I am not saying i am the best and they are the worst but i don't know why people stop helping !!!!

And that's why poverty is spreading hugely.

People stopped helping . everyone thinks i don't have ENOUGH money so i won't give.

And then we call ourselves great Muslims. Did not the prophet say that a Muslims won't be a good one if his neighbor slept without food !!! .

But we do have ENOUGH food, we do when we take our kids to the park and spent a 100 SR the least, so 10 riyal won't cost us a thing.

People will leave a supermarket with carts full and pass by a poor without giving a thing and those who give will put few riyals in their hands and "we don't have enough money for our families".

I saw these things. i watch my society.

I was leaving a big bookshop once when i saw an old man was standing in front of the door asking for money and people keep passing him by with their bags full of expensive stuff and books.

We have a strange notion of not helping. We claim that these people are not REALLY poor and that they are pretending, really ??? .

OK, let's believe you , so what 's the problem if you give this poor liar beggar some money??.

how do you know that he is a lying ?

because we READ it in the newspaper and the advices that we shouldn't encourage beggars, they are showing a really uncivilized face to our country.

Now that's the only thing uncivilized about our country ??

It's just an excuse not to help.

But remember , some of them were in good position before and one day you might be in their shoes ...

Oh and yes if that poor person happens to be a non-Saudi. Then, whey the hell they don't leave our country and go find help in their countries. !!!!

Did anyone think that's that what brought them here in the first place, their countries are poor and this country SUPPOSED to be rich.

And don't let me talk about the role of the government and their institution and organization and what did they do to help the poor.

It's scary and the number of poor people are rising. And rarely do we help.

Remember last time when i said i wanted to collect some money for the poor. Actually it happened that i can not do that because the government has very strict rules into collecting money thanks to Al Qaeda and 9/11 .

What a way to help Muslims, jerks !!!.

And we keep calling ourselves Muslims. The irony is that the "infidel west " pays to the poor world way much more than the Poor Arabic and Islamic world does.

On final note, two days ago the Saudi newspapers have announced that the number of rich Saudi have increased 14 %. Mabrook, now help your poor fellow citizen.

The article explained that to be included in this list you have to have a MILLION, just one. The Total number of rich Saudis now is 104,000.

I won't judge the 14% yet, poor they. They just got their first million, let them enjoy it and then we can talk about them.

But what about the old ones,

what have they done to their societies and the poor ?? .

don't tell me they do it secretly. It's OK in Islam to show what you give if your intent is clear.

So what have they done?

Why are the number of poor increasing? .

Except a few names -like Abdalltef Jamel- we rarely hear about them.

Now that's the real shame .

How does poverty affect people ?

I read an article on the whyfiles.org about how does poverty affect people. It's a must read, and here it's ( it's a long article ):-

Poverty, violence, stress and abuse: recipe for trouble

The U.S. unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent, and more than 17 percent of American children are poor. For too many kids, poverty brings hunger, even homelessness. Fathers who are absent and crime that is present. Stressed-out relationships and burned-out schools. And health care that flits between inadequate and non-existent.

( Dorothea Lange photo, Library of Congress

A migrant farm worker and her family in Nipomo, Calif., shows the face of poverty in March, 1936)

Although it's not news that poverty can be harmful, that poor kids, on average, have an outsize share of problems, researchers are building a detailed, almost mechanistic, picture of how negative conditions associated with poverty can set kids up for physical, emotional and social problems.

"There is growing evidence that adversity early in life has long-term consequences on physical and mental health well into adulthood," says Jack Shonkoff, who organized the "long reach of childhood poverty" session at the February 2010 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

To Shonkoff, a professor of pediatrics and child development at Harvard University, the new studies suggest that the long-term impact of childhood deprivation can be seen as a result of "toxic stress," which are demands from the environment that overload the child. New studies suggest that overwhelming stress -- caused by abuse, neglect or violence -- "has an impact on the brain and other organs," Shonkoff says.

Shonkoff hopes the new findings from neuroscience and other branches of science can be the basis for closing the persistent gap between poor kids and the rest of us. "The basic approach now for trying to improve outcomes [for poor kids] ... is to provide rich learning opportunities, Head Start and everything that came after it, to provide rich language stimulation and age appropriate opportunities for learning. When that's done well ... we can shift the trajectory toward better outcomes: more kids graduating high school, fewer kids in jail. But it doesn't completely close the gap. The question is, what else is to be done?"

An enduring pain

Many studies suggest that the effects of childhood troubles -- whether they are caused by poverty or not -- are durable. The Adverse Childhood Experiences project, for example, has studied more than 17,000 California adults, looking at the link between adverse childhood experiences like abuse, witnessing domestic violence, and drug or alcohol abuse in the household, with 18 outcomes, including depression, anxiety, hallucination, difficulty controlling anger and promiscuity.

The project found that every single negative outcome was significantly more common among adults who had suffered adverse experiences as a child . The risk of panic reactions, depressed mood, anxiety and hallucinations was more than doubled among adults with at least four adverse types of experience.

After at least four adverse childhood experiences, odds of damaging behavior increase. A study (see "The enduring effects ..." in bibliography) found that the odds for these behaviors increase as follows:

• Smoking: 1.8
• Obesity: 1.9
• Anxiety: 2.4
• Depression: 3.6
• Illicit drug use: 4.5
• Early sexual activity: 6.6
• Alcoholism: 7.2

Although violence, abuse and neglect can affect any child, "every one of these conditions is more common among people who grew up poor or were abused as children," says Shonkoff. And in a sense, the distinction between poor and non-poor kids does not matter: a better picture of the long-term health effects of a bad environment could lead to a win-win solution for kids who are poor, and for other kids.

How do abuse and neglect change the brain?

Abuse and neglect can overwork the stress response and warp the mind: The stress hormone cortisol normally prepares the body for activity by increasing blood pressure and blood sugar, but problems can arise when stress is overloaded. "Kids who are subject to physical or sexual abuse show either chronically heightened cortisol, or are unable to mount a significant cortisol response to mild stress," says Nathan Fox of the University of Maryland. "Both cases are associated with disregulated behavior, an inability to control emotion or sustain attention."

Abuse and neglect can change the personality: Seth Pollak of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has shown that after significant abuse, children are quicker to detect anger in their environment, and start to see the world as unduly hostile. Pollak recently studied kids after their adoption from orphanages, and found deficits in visual memory and learning, and control of inhibitions, but not in auditory processing, or the ability to plan or follow rules. "These findings suggest that specific aspects of brain behavioral circuitry may be particularly vulnerable" to experience after birth, Pollak wrote with his coauthors

Stress can physically change the brain: A study published in late 2009 showed that the children of mothers who had been highly anxious at 19 weeks of gestation had significantly less gray matter in brain regions devoted to language and thought .

Depressed mothers matter: Depression, by sapping energy and interest in life, and by disturbing sleep and concentration, can make a mother less responsive to her child, and detract from the energy and emotional investment necessary for raising a family. Nine months after birth, significant depression affects 25 percent of poor mothers, and 11 percent of non-poor mothers. According to new study from the United Kingdom, "Depression in pregnancy significantly predicted violence in adolescence, even after controlling for the family environment, the child's later exposure to maternal depression, the mother's smoking and drinking during pregnancy, and parents' antisocial behavior" .

Poor mothers often have poor children, but timing matters: A program to reduce the trans-generational effects of poverty are most needed when parental poverty is most damaging. A new study has found that the mother's poverty from one year before the child's birth, up to age 5, played the greatest role in economic trouble when the children were in their 20s.

Courtesy Working Paper No. 8, Center on the Developing Child.

Depression, a disabling mental disorder that can obstruct mother-child interactions, is much more common among poor mothers.

Explaining what we already know?

As Shonkoff admits, it's no news that being poor causes trouble for children. "People say, 'You're still doing research? We've known that for long time!'" But details on the timing and mechanism of damage are starting to reveal exactly how children are being damaged, and that suggests how to prevent trouble. "What's exciting is that we are learning what it is about poverty that gets under the skin, into the body, and leads to problems with learning and behavior, with physical and mental health," says Shonkoff, who directs Harvard's Center on the Developing Child.

It's not just a matter of abstract research, Shonkoff says. "We can use this information to be smarter in investments to protect children from poverty, and to prevent some consequences. It's not inevitable that kids in poverty should have these problems."

Stressed out

In psychology, "stress" happens when we are forced to respond to a physical, emotional or environmental "stressor."

Stress can be helpful: running stresses our bones and muscles, and they get stronger. We're attacked by a saber-toothed tiger, and a quick hormonal jolt dumps sugar into our blood and redirects blood to the large muscles, in preparation for a life-or-death sprint.

( Dorothea Lange photo, National Archives.

This young mother, a migrant worker from Texas, was photographed in Kern County, Calif., April 11, 1940)

But chronically elevated levels of the "stress hormone" cortisol can cause distress, and we are not talking about feeling bad. We are talking changes in the brain.

In 2007, Curt Sandman of the University of California at Irvine linked high maternal levels of cortisol at 30 to 32 weeks of pregnancy with "negative reactivity" in infants two months after birth. In English, the infants showed an unusually strong startle reaction after a sudden stimulus like a honking horn.

Cortisol measurements at other moments of pregnancy were not linked to negative reactivity .

Brain drain

More recently, Sandman and colleagues used an MRI to show that a pregnant mother's anxiety about the course of the pregnancy affects the structure of her child's brain at ages 6 to 9.

"That maternal anxiety can change the structure of the brain in a way that appears to be permanent is quite a remarkable finding," Sandman says. The data relating brain structure to cortisol levels (rather than anxiety) have yet to be published, but will likely show the same phenomenon, he added .

Curiously, generalized anxiety did not correlate with a change in brain structure. This shortage of gray matter is worrisome, Sandman says. "We know that the areas of the brain with reduced volume are related to cognition. These areas serve learning and memory, and certain of our findings with a younger cohort, at 12 months ... provide crystal-clear evidence that exposure to cortisol modulates cognitive performance."

The "modulation" is not all negative, however: High cortisol levels reduce cognitive ability early in pregnancy but later on they enhance it.

Although Sandman says the subjects in his brain-volume study were middle- or upper-class, "Our guess is that all our findings would be more dramatic in a population that had some real stresses. We have a very healthy cohort, and are still finding effects of pregnancy anxiety. We can assume that anybody who struggles with the current economic climate, and poverty, would have these stresses in much greater magnitude."

To Shonkoff of Harvard, "toxic stress" is the unifying principle in some of the mechanisms that harm young kids. The stress response is "magnificent" for dealing with acute stress, he says, but when the stress response gets stuck in gear due to the presence of a drug-addicted or physically abusive parent, a chronic stress reaction can harm the brain and other organs.

We know enough to act, Shonkoff concludes. "In the same way we understand that toxins like lead in the environment can cause organ damage, and so we screen for that, we should try to prevent or treat an overactive stress response that is producing chemicals that harm the organs."

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

One indicator of parental poverty, participation in the federal Women, Infants and Children program, has been rising since 1992.

De-stressing

A new focus on mitigating the chronic stresses of childhood could emerge from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, says Katherine Magnuson, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Act is funding early childhood advisory councils that will "look at the range of programs, at how well they are serving the need, and see what's missing. In most states, people know a lot more about early education, preschool, than about infant mental health, developmental screening for children, and making sure moms are screened for depression."

Maternal depression is prime for action, says Shonkoff. "A lot of science shows how chronic depression in mothers affects their response to their kids, and affects the kid's brain development, but no-one is connecting the dots." Verbal, physical and spoken interplay between parents and children promotes emotional and intellectual growth, he says, but depression saps energy and vitality, and therefore impairs the interaction.

Maternal depression should be a key interest of early-childhood programs, Shonkoff says. "We combed the literature and although there are lots of effective treatments for maternal depression, almost none are being evaluated for their impact on kids. If you don't have treatment focused on the interaction with the child, you get no improvement for the child, and the pattern of unresponsiveness gets hardened."

Courtesy Center on the Developing Child, Working Paper No. 8.

Instead, Shonkoff says, "We should combine treatment for the mother with work to help her understand how interacting with the kids is so important. It's obvious, but if you look at all the programs out there, there is no integrated approach to treatment. This is the craziness of how compartmentalized" social service programs have become, he says.

Although schools and other agencies have striven to provide enriching experiences, they are not enough, Shonkoff says. "Just providing richer opportunities is helping provide what the brain needs, but it's not helping with what the brain needs to be protected from."

Economic insights

When does poverty matter most to growing children? In a study published in January, Greg Duncan, a professor of education at the University of California at Irvine, correlated adults' current economic condition with their economic status during childhood. "We wanted to see whether there were any strong links, approaching causation, not just association, between economic deprivation at different ages, and adult economic outcomes," says Duncan.

March, 2009, karpov the wrecked train

Crime can be a cause and effect of childhood stress. Here's a juvenile jail in Detroit, Michigan.

Those outcomes were measured by earnings, working hours, and school completion. Duncan found that "all the action" was related to the mother's income from the year before the child's birth until age five. For poor kids, the statistics associated a $3,000 increase in annual income at this time with a 17 percent rise in earnings when the kids were adults.

Other problems often associated with poverty, like out-of-wedlock births or committing crime, did not correlate as neatly with early income, Duncan says .

Through statistical legerdemain, Duncan says he and his colleagues tried to remove possible confounders. "We were able to isolate the effects of early childhood income by controlling for an extensive list of family conditions, the education of the parents, the test scores for parents [typically the mother] and the family structure."

The study was not equipped to answer the inevitable "why" question, Duncan admits. One category of explanation, he says, focuses on what money can buy, "a better neighborhood, a better learning environment, better day care. The second focuses on depressed parents, harsh parenting, the psychological processes that might be going on in a family with stressful economic conditions. The evidence we saw tends to point toward the first explanation ... but we'd have liked to have had measures" of other relevant factors, such as housing, the home learning environment, and the quality of school and child care.

Chart: UNICEF

When poverty among children under 18 years is defined as having an equivalent household income less than 50 percent of the national median, the United States comes in last.

Throw money at the problem?

If poverty hurts, money helps. Duncan says several "random-assignment experiments" have shown that children in families that got more income through a variety of mechanisms had higher test scores and rates of school graduation.

During the welfare reform of the 1990s, states tried to cajole parents on welfare to work, and some states supplemented wage income by roughly $2,000 per year. Three studies later found improvements in child achievement, but only in states that supplemented the earned income, Duncan says.

Another "quasi-experiment" occurred when the Earned Income Tax Credit, which distributes income to the working poor through the federal income tax system, roughly doubled its payout from 1993 to 1997. According to Magnuson of the University of Wisconsin, significant improvements in school achievement followed the increase. She says a similar thing has happened among Native American tribes after they started getting casino income.

Maybe it's not too shocking: If the problem is a shortage of money, money can help...

End of the article .

Now can money help ?

Yes. it can. And yes we can stop all the things that's happening to people because of poverty.

If you wish to help go donate to some charity where you know they will send your money to the poor and if you don't know any, then on the right of my blog, there are groups of charity where you can help , check their sites.

P.S: a lovely post about poverty by Kanwalful here