As she hung what appeared to be plenty of food, it was easy to forget that like so many children in Guatemala, Maria and her family battled chronic micronutrient deficiencies. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Micronutrient deficiency is widespread. Roughly 2 billion people around the world suffer from iron deficiency, for example, and 250 million preschool children worldwide are deficient in vitamin A. Iodine deficiency, the most prevalent cause of brain damage in the world, is easily preventable, yet it remains a problem in fifty-four countries. Guatemala battles all these nutrition deficits. Almost 50 percent of children under five in the country suffer chronic malnutrition, and 30 percent of pregnant women have nutritional deficits.2 Even when children such as Maria survive into their teens, they often are anemic and suffer painful thyroid disorders. What’s more, their immunity is often compromised, rendering them dangerously vulnerable to otherwise survivable infections such as measles.
Undernutrition begins in the womb. Undernourished mothers cannot provide proper vitamins and minerals that a baby needs to develop normally. Unwell, undernourished children often lack the ability to concentrate and develop mentally, and later they lack the energy to attend school. They experience what is called stunting and never reach their full height potential. SAM victims need immediate calories and nutrients to survive a crisis, but food security is about the long haul, from cradle to old age. Childhood undernutrition ultimately leads to cardiovascular disease, immune disorders, and psychological and developmental disorders.
According to the experts at WFP, one misconception about global nutritional deficiency is that it’s a fairly recent development, stemming from people falling out of harmony with their environment or abandoning traditional diets. Reality turns out to be much more complicated. Scientists say that the micronutrient issue appeared about ten thousand years ago when humans who had evolved as hunter-gatherers turned to agriculture. The transition shifted food consumption worldwide, and the majority of the human diet became cereal and tuber crops. While growing crops took less energy than hunting animals, grains possess fewer vitamins and minerals than meat. The human body hasn’t adapted much yet (ten thousand years is brief from an evolutionary perspective), and so the lack of vitamins and minerals is problematic on a global basis.
Undernutrition is widespread in the developing world, but it exists in the developed world as well. If you aren’t getting the amount of calories you need, you are unlikely to be getting enough of many different healthful components of food. In the United States, we have obese individuals who are malnourished. They eat meat but are not getting the exercise of the hunter-gatherers. And they also have diets high in fat, sugar, and processed foods but deficient in vitamins and minerals. These deficits impair their immune systems and lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other health complications such as weak bones and skin conditions.3
One member of my team spoke recently with a pediatric nurse in California who explained that among Hispanic farmworkers in California’s famous Napa wine country, studies showed pervasive iron deficiency in the children. Iron deficiency at a young age can create lifelong deficits in brain development. “We need to educate these families—some of whom are sending home money to family members in Mexico or other countries—that they are unwittingly shortchanging their own children,” she explained. “They are trying to spread their resources too thin and giving their own children instant soup night after night, but not enough protein or fresh vegetables for vitamins and minerals.”
Undernutrition has unique elements that depend on the ecosystems and societies involved. There is no unchanging Garden of Eden anywhere. Anthropologists say that for as long as humans have been on the Earth, entire cultures have died out from all sorts of “natural” factors. The ecosystems on which we rely for our food are changing, influenced by weather shifts, new animal or plant species appearing or disappearing, or the emergence of pathogens. In response, humans have migrated around the world as famines or droughts struck, or herds died from extreme weather, or food staples developed diseases or were wiped out by pests. Consider the Irish who emigrated to America when the potato famine decimated Ireland’s food supply in the nineteenth century. Some scientists believe that overworking and failing to protect soil played a role in the decline of civilizations, including those of the Greeks, Romans, and Mayans.4
In many regions of Central America, native people can but do not grow green vegetables packed with vital nutrients such as vitamin A. I’m told that generally speaking, the people do not have a tradition of raising these crops. They often have limited education in general and almost no exposure to health and nutrition advice, and they grow what feeds the most people. They often have plenty of tortillas and beans, so they have sufficient protein, and they eat until full. Yet the lack of micronutrients leads to their children developing blindness, thyroid problems, and other metabolic disorders. In these situations, families have to be educated about nutrition, encouraged to diversify their diets, plant more green vegetables, and sometimes receive nutritional fortification—in the form of supplements to correct imbalances.
Nutrient fortification is an essential intervention to address malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies in children. WFP distributes bags of fortified meal in Guatemalan villages. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Food insecurity involves not only a lack of calories needed to keep people going every day but also insufficient access to the nutrients that make a child grow properly at vital stages and that allow human beings to thrive at every age. My photograph of Maria is a constant reminder to me that living is not the same as thriving and that achieving food security is never a quick fix.
Story 11
Little Cromite
His gray shirt was unbuttoned, and the scar peeking out from the center of the young man’s chest was about as wide as the blade of a bread knife. It was not a ragged wound—it was eerily neat. HWB and I were sitting in an empty schoolyard in the Sierra Leone countryside in 2008, and the young man we were talking with seemed both jumpy and vigilant, his eyes continually sweeping the open area around us. They showed little humanity or feeling. Twenty years old, surviving on the equivalent of pennies a day and occasional food aid, this particular face of hunger represents not the biology of insufficient food or nutrients, but the lengths to which starving children with no other options have been pushed to survive.
Hunger is always, to some degree, a companion to war. There is the famous saying “An army moves on its stomach,” and in conflict zones, it’s common to see combatants running people off their land, stealing food—even using starvation as a military tactic. Controlling whether an enemy or a captured population eats or not can be a powerful lever. Yet sometimes the perpetrators of the violence are victims too.
At the time of our visit, the issue of “conflict diamonds” had caught the media’s attention. In part, it was due to the 2006 film Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which had caused a worldwide stir, drawing attention to the true cost of luxury extracted with the blood and lives of some of the poorest people on the planet. It centered on the story of a poor man who came across a giant diamond while toiling under armed guards in the miserable, muddy diamond mining pits of Sierra Leone. The man was a farmer, and his son was brutally taken away from him by the vicious thugs of the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF. The rest of the man’s family ended up in a refugee camp, while he was sent to the district of Kono to mine diamonds to help support the rebels in the civil war. His son, meanwhile, became a child soldier.
The film’s story is grounded in real events in Sierra Leone. The RUF was a mercenary rebel faction supported by powerful Liberian warlord Charles Taylor throughout the 1990s, including during his presidency. (In 2012 the International Criminal Court sentenced the sixty-four-year-old Taylor to fifty years in prison for the atrocities he ordered as president.) To gain control over the rich diamond mines close to Liberia’s border, Taylor instigated civil war and terrorized the people of Sierra Leone
. The rebel group abducted thousands of children like the boy in the movie and the young man in front of me at the schoolyard in Sierra Leone. The RUF moved through villages, systematically killing chiefs, village elders, government employees, and innocent civilians. Throughout the 1990s and up to the official end of the civil war in 2002, an estimated fifty thousand people were killed, and up to half the country’s population was displaced, including tens of thousands to Liberia and Guinea.1 In a terrifying scene from the movie, RUF soldiers holding machetes grabbed villagers and stretched their arms out over a stump or table. A soldier would ask, “Long sleeves? Short sleeves?” The meaning: Do you want your arm chopped above or below the elbow?
By the time we visited Sierra Leone, there had been a stable peace for a half dozen years. But the consequences of the conflict would forever haunt the people who had lived through it. We learned that many had been forced off their land so that the government could sell diamond mining rights to foreign corporations. There were thousands of widows trying to raise multiple children with no resources. In addition to the massacres and the displacement, the long sleeves/short sleeves torture had created an estimated twenty-seven thousand amputees.2 In some cases, both their arms had been cut off. Many others, including huge numbers of former combatants with no skills and no other way to support themselves, now worked in diamond mines for pennies a day.
I toured the diamond mines of both Kono and Kenema, and saw that Hollywood had not exaggerated the horrors of this situation. In Sierra Leone, hundreds of millions of dollars—billions, even—in diamonds and other minerals are pulled from the ground by some of the world’s poorest people. In 2012 Sierra Leone ranked 177th out of 187 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, and per capita Gross National Income is less than $2 per day.3
Africa’s resource wealth has long been a curse for its poorest people. A government funded mostly by oil, gold, or diamonds does not need to be concerned with taxes or votes. Corrupt leaders can sell off their country’s assets. Misuse of resource wealth removes ordinary people from the political process and undermines any chance at democracy.
There has been some progress in Sierra Leone. But I realized in looking at the conditions at the mines during my visit that the years of conflict had severed any compassionate connection between the government and its people. Boys as young as eight, wiry from the exertion and without an ounce of fat on their bodies, carried bags of dirt and pebbles back and forth from the pits to a sorting and cleaning area all day long. The tension around the miners and the guards was thick. I wondered: If the last decades’ leaders had needed to rely on a voting public for support, would this horrible, slavish labor for a few cents and perhaps a cup of rice per day in the diamond mines have developed?
Where hope is gone, life is cheap and violence is power. At one point, as we advanced toward the muddy banks of a pond where miners were working the pebbles, looking for diamonds, guards holding pickaxes and machetes watched us. I had my camera by my side and decided to squeeze off some shots from my hip to see if I could capture some of the conditions. The click-click-click was deafening, and the men began yelling and walking toward us, their weapons in hand. We apologized and backtracked with help from our government hosts. These guards and many of the miners had been soldiers, my hosts explained. Many were angry, aggressive men who saw little reason for hope. Later my hosts arranged a conversation between me and a miner out of the line of sight of his employers. “They are sending us to our graves day by day,” he said.
LITTLE CROMITE
A contact from one of the NGOs connected me with a “convener,” as they were called in Sierra Leone: middlemen who, for a small fee, would arrange meetings for foreigners trying to do business or gather information. This is not at all how I usually conduct business, but it was the only way to get access to former combatants here. I wanted to understand what these people had endured.
The convener insisted that we meet way outside town and in small groups to draw less attention. We met with ten former child soldiers, usually three at a time. We met boys who fought directly, and girls who were abducted to serve as “wives” of the RUF commanders and soldiers. The girls, now women, had lived in a state of relentless rape and slavery. They too, often for the amusement and sadism of their captors, would be ordered to torture or kill villagers that the RUF wanted to wipe out or intimidate.
The boy in the gray shirt would not say his given name. His jungle name, however, was “Little Cromite.” Jungle names and operation names give some sense of the level of barbarism that shaped the lives of these children: we also met Spare No One. They had reported to CO-Blood, short for Commander Blood. Their forays included “Operation No Living Thing” and “Operation Demolish Everything.” Chromite, spelled differently, is a mineral made up of iron, magnesium, oxygen, and chromium, a hard metal often mixed with iron to make stainless steel for knives. Little Cromite’s experiences had hardened him.
Little Cromite said he was abducted from the town of Kabula at age six. He said the RUF killed his mother in front of him and chopped off her breasts. Unless he went with her killers, he would not survive. As a little boy, he was too small to march and carry his gun, so they let him tie a rope around it and drag it behind him as his group moved from place to place. From an early age, he was injected with cocaine during the day by his commander, to give him the energy to fight and kill and torture, and the commander gave him marijuana to smoke at night to keep him under control. At age nine, when he objected to taking more drugs, his commanders slit open his chest, creating the slot-like scar he has today, and rubbed cocaine in it, inches from his heart.
I was sitting in an empty and abandoned schoolyard when I met “Little Cromite.” He asked if we could help him get to Somalia to fight. He was hungry, he had no job, but he knew how to shoot a gun, something he learned at age six after being abducted by the Revolutionary United Front. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Psychologists believe that any person can get used to killing and even torturing when his or her captors are skilled in the art of mind control. Little Cromite grew up in a drugged state, a horror show beginning with his own mother’s murder. He was told to kill, or his hands would be cut off. He was part of roving bands that would lock a family in its home and then burn it down; his was a world in which snitches were punished by punching a hole in the upper and lower lips and threading a padlock through the wounds and snapping it shut. He described once cutting open the belly of a pregnant woman because two soldiers were arguing about whether they could predict the sex of the baby she carried.
I won’t continue in this vein. I have not even included the most extreme stories. I will never forget the look on one woman’s face when she said, “We have seen things that no one should see.”
One of the reasons I remain so committed to paying attention to victims of conflict and postconflict situations is that when you hear these stories, you understand the lasting damage inflicted on individuals such as Little Cromite. The child soldiers were ripped from their families and subjected to unending brutality; their humanity was stripped from their souls by the acts they were forced to commit. They were and are victims. And when the fighting was over, what was left? They were uneducated, unskilled for anything but war, traumatized, and, in many cases, permanently brain-damaged from drugs.
A few organizations have gone into Sierra Leone to try to train some of these former child soldiers to work in farming or in other sectors, but it is difficult to overcome the psychological damage. During a series of meetings we had in a half-finished school building outside town, a former soldier who had found out about our meetings decided to crash the session. I could see that even the other former child soldiers were nervous about talking to us in front of him. His eyes were wild, and perspiration rolled down his face. “I can show you!” he bellowed repeatedly at one point, recounting the rampages he and the other ex-soldiers would carry out. I was not the only one in the group who worried he meant that literally; that
he lusted for a fresh kill to demonstrate the techniques he had learned from the RUF.
I spoke to more than one former child soldier who seemed disoriented and uncomfortable with his “freedom,” if you can call it that. I suspect it’s not unlike criminal offenders who have spent twenty years in prison and, upon release, have no idea how to act in a world where they have to think for themselves instead of following prescribed rules. Many re-offend, sometimes within days of release. Another child soldier said, somewhat quietly, “I had three meals a day, a gun, and a woman. That’s more than I have now.” When you are starving and have no hope, life gets basic.
Despite all he’d experienced as a child soldier, Little Cromite asked me before we left if I could help get him to Somalia to fight there as a mercenary. A child who experienced hunger but also a loving family would not, I believe, turn to murder or torture to keep himself alive. But the diabolical reprogramming that life as a child soldier involves has pushed many of these young people into a moral twilight state.
Our foundation has supported projects to try to educate and reorient former child soldiers to productive activities, such as farming. This is challenging: often local people understandably hate and fear them. When we were touring the diamond mines, I recall thinking that the thousands of workers were a ready-made army, already trained, willing to do anything for food. And yet if we ignore them and make no effort to bring them back into the mainstream of life, the anger and evil of their childhood experience may keep exploding in new ways.
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