Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

Last night I watched an interesting show on Discovery Times Channel about starvation in Ethiopia. I was interested to see it having spent a couple of weeks there some years ago.

I was impressed with the Ethiopian people. They were all very friendly (except for the security officials of the Marxist government of the time), and seemed to be a positive group. Once Mengitsu was ousted and the Soviets disappeared, I tried to follow the growth there as best I could on the internet. They seemed to be going in the right direction, with the education system geared toward agricultural research and computer system development–the old A&M mix of Ag and Engineering.

People in Ethiopia are still starving, but the show never really got into why. The story followed a man as he lived in a rural village for a month, living the life of the locals. The area looks like great farm land, yet everyone lived on wild cabbage, grass, an occasional chicken, and a 12.5kg ration of grain from the government each month. And the grain wasn’t always forthcoming.

Flies and bedbugs thrived, which highlighted a major problem in undeveloped nations: sanitation.

President Kennedy established the Peace Corps for just this kind of thing. I support the concept, and only wish it could do more. But there are significant cultural changes which must accompany any such efforts, and those changes take not years, but generations to take root. The old saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” is valid, but the man cannot simply be taught then left on his own when he has been accustomed to receiving all his fish from the government his entire life. He will revert to depending on others unless fishing for his own food becomes a habit.

All the non-governmental agencies in the world are no help if they simply show up in a village, build a communal outhouse, dig a well, and leave. During the Mengitsu regime, Ethiopians depended on the government for everything, which is why starvation was rampant. Famine is the most effective and enduring weapon of mass destruction ever wielded. Every despot in history has used it, and they are using it today. When people spend generations learning to starve, and live only on food provided, they need generations to break the habit.

One man said he couldn’t plant because he didn’t have a draft animal to pull a plow. I immediately thought about one garden I planted for myself. I used a shovel to turn all the soil before planting. My garden was only about 1000 square feet, and I turned it all in a day. 1000 square feet won’t provide food for an entire year, but a week of shovel work will, especially in an environment like Ethiopia which has a year-round growing season.

Sanitation prevents disease. Building outhouses is easy. Getting people to use them requires cultural change. The man highlighted in the show got tired of being a meal for bedbugs, and went to the local stream to bathe. Locals watched in amazement as he used soap to lather up. The locals all showed off their scabs and sores for the camera, but wouldn’t take part in using a bar of soap. Cultural change required.

Digging a well, clear of sanitation issues, requires only a few days of effort. But the well must be maintained. If left on their own, people who aren’t used to getting water from a well will revert to whatever they did before if it breaks down. They must be involved in the construction to know what needs to be done to maintain it, and they must be given time to acclimate themselves to its use by habit. A one-year mission by a Peace Corps volunteer doesn’t create the changes needed. The effort must be continual to allow a new generation to grow up in the new environment and see it as the norm.

Then we have to hope a new regime doesn’t come in and turn a breadbasket into a basket case. Zimbabwe.