Wherever people are starving and fear for their future, terrorists and fanatics will use food to lure some to the darkest corners of human existence. Food is power.
Story 12
Sex and Hunger in Timbuktu
When I was a kid, you would hear people refer to the West African city of Timbuktu, a name that is both exotic and fun to say. It was used in the context of “in the middle of nowhere.” If someone seemed to be packed for a long, arduous trip, you might say, “Looks like you’re off to Timbuktu.”
In 2003 I visited Timbuktu, located in the nation of Mali at the edge of the Sahara. It is an oasis in a barren, vast desert. Its primary sources of income are trading salt, mining gold, and growing rice and cotton. I was there in part because I wanted to talk with locals about some of the issues around agricultural price supports and efforts by the World Bank at the time to liberalize the economy and push it toward free markets. Mali is extremely poor and barely grows enough rice to feed its own people. Unfortunately, what I learned on the ground was that the World Bank’s efforts were likely to have two brutal impacts. The first was farmers trying to convert fragile land to growing cotton, which would ruin the land and not provide any long-term benefit. The second consequence was that the existing system was at least returning some funding to support local education and health care there, which would change if the market was liberalized.
Timbuktu is a walled city and not at all modern. The streets are covered in sand, and the buildings are sandstone. Timbuktu is located where the Niger River flows north into the southern Sahara. Although isolated, it has long been a crossroad for local tribes and traders. Gold from the south mines at Boure and Banbuk was brought to the city and exchanged for goods and salt. When I visited, traders and farmers still were using camels to move around and transport their goods.
Camel trains were still a common sight in Timbuktu when I visited in 2003; unfortunately, so were signs of poverty and the lack of options for so many people around this remote, walled city. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
The Tuareg people founded Timbuktu in the fifth century. They are nomadic herders who for centuries have roamed the Sahara looking for grazing lands and water for their animals. Timbuktu also became an intellectual center for scholars of Islam: the city’s historic mosques and extensive collections of manuscripts led to its being designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. There are many explanations for the city’s name, but the most memorable one I heard there concerned an old woman who lived near a well near the Niger River. She would watch the Tuaregs’ possessions while they moved on with the animals during rains. Supposedly the area became known for a variation of her name, which referred to the protrusion of her navel!
But when I hear the name Timbuktu spoken today, it has no connection for me whatsoever to these historical references or as a fancy way to say “far away.” Instead, I am reminded of the tragedy of a young woman named Mohair, whom I once photographed there. She lived in what is called the “belt of misery.” And to me she will always be a vivid face of the close connection between hunger and sexual exploitation around the world.
I have seen many heartbreaking examples of the sex trade that flourishes in areas of extreme poverty and hunger. At a landfill outside the city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, I once visited an area where dozens of children spent their days picking over rotting, discarded loads dumped by trucks onto steaming piles. After only a minute or two out of the car, my eyes were burning and my throat closing from the intense stench and the methane gas. I cannot imagine the state of these children’s lungs and sinuses from living in this environment all the time, not to mention that many sniff glue to get through it.
I photographed Carla, a thirteen-year-old girl who earned about fifty cents a day sorting through the garbage hauled there all day and selling the occasional salvageable scrap. Her eyelids were heavy and her eyes glassy from the glue she inhaled during the day to try to blot out the stink and deaden her suffering. Carla and her friends could not make enough from their scavenging, so they would sell their bodies to the truck drivers dumping the garbage to pick up a few dollars for each encounter.
Carla and others would sniff glue through a bag to pass the time and deaden the pain of hunger and abuse. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
This kind of scene is repeated all over the world, in slums, red-light districts, truck stops, and other places where those with few options gather. Hunger and sex also are connected by the sinister characters who watch and lie in wait to exploit vulnerable, starving people however they can. We funded a well-drilling project in Ethiopia once. The engineering was excellent, and it appeared to be a positive development for the community. But six months later we received a report that a man had arrived in the town and gone from home to home holding papers he claimed were issued by the government allowing him to demand a tax on the water from the new well. (Many people couldn’t read, so the papers could have said anything.) If they could not pay the tax, he explained, he would be willing to take the “use” of one of their daughters for, say, a month. Water is a life-or-death proposition. By the time we found out, a number of families had supplied their daughters, who were forced to work as prostitutes for this man. When our partners discovered what was going on, the NGO in charge went to authorities, and we were told the man was arrested.
In the developing world, dumps attract homeless, desperate people looking for scraps to eat. I have to stuff my nose with tissues and breathe through my mouth just to spend an hour photographing landfills like this one, or else I cannot stand the burning stench. These children experience hell on Earth. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
No country has a corner on this market, and no country is immune. The US State Department estimates that 27 million people are trafficked worldwide, and human trafficking in the United States has been on the rise. An estimated 14,500 or more people kidnapped in other countries are brought into the United States every year1—many of them women and girls forced to work in massage parlors and bordellos. There are runaway teens who fall prey to pimps. There are even elaborate networks of kidnapped, often drug-addicted American teens and children who are transported over state lines and forced to work as prostitutes. Many people don’t think of young US runaways as faces of hunger, but you can be sure that having no resources and being at the mercy of those who control whether you eat or not is a fundamental part of this equation. These children are victims of a variety of kinds of exploitation at the hands of criminal adults. Sometimes they are running from terrible, dangerous circumstances at home. Whatever has driven them to the streets, they are often hungry and vulnerable.
THE DEFINITION OF MISERY
The belt of misery exists right outside Timbuktu in encampments where former nomads huddle together to try to get access to shelter and water. There is some farmwork, and “mud workers” help build structures for a small wage, but the people here generally live on pennies a day. Temperatures during the Mali summer can top 110 degrees. Thick dust storms cover the urban landscapes in a monochromatic powder.
There still exists a form of slavery in the region, which once was a supplier to the Africa-US slave trade. And according to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), in some areas of Mali, 92 percent of women have undergone female genital mutilation and cutting. Most are excised before reaching the age of five, following the cultural belief that removing parts of the female genitalia will keep a young girl chaste and improve her chances of finding a good husband.2 In addition to increasing the potential for complications during birth, the negative health consequences of the practice can include hemorrhage, HIV infection, infertility, and death.
It seems ironic that at the same time such a practice exists to uphold the “chasteness” of some women, there is no concern for so many others who must participate in the sex trade because they are out of options. Timbuktu is so far from any other place, in a sea of barren, hot, dry desert, that to be born
into poverty there is to be doomed. My local NGO hosts told me that by religion and local custom in Timbuktu, a visiting man can select a young woman from the streets and declare that she is his wife and must sleep with him. When he’s ready to leave, he can declare, “I divorce you” three times, and he then sheds any obligation to her or to a child that may result.
I visited a training class in Timbuktu where women were learning how to sew. Mohair’s beauty and quiet dignity drew me to photograph her. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
Before leaving Timbuktu, I photographed a girl named Mohair, who was born into the belt of misery. She was fifteen when I met her, and she already had a child. It is painful to think that a young woman who displayed the same poise and dignity in person as she does in this photograph is forced into circumstances that result in a child from imposed prostitution. We met a number of pregnant teenage girls forced to do the same. These circumstances guarantee a self-replacing class of uneducated, poor, starving people who have no option to leave.
Story 13
Loss in Armenia
For decades, Armenia’s economy relied mostly on heavy industry and bureaucrats in the former Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic who managed the country’s entire agricultural system. They issued orders to plant and harvest, and they distributed seed and fertilizer to farmers. When that structure vanished after Armenia won its independence in 1991, many farmers had no way to access inputs or equipment. Many just walked off the land and tried to find work elsewhere. Squatters moved into abandoned properties and tried to figure out how to grow food. Food shortages erupted throughout the country, and ongoing conflict with neighboring countries sapped resources. Yet the country needed agricultural production more than ever.
In 2005 I went to Armenia to better understand what was going on and to see if we could help rebuild these broken agricultural systems. We traveled to different areas of the country to investigate. But the searing images I brought home from this particular trip had less to do with agriculture than with the intense pain of loss. I was especially touched by the situations of a number of elderly people in the province of Lori and a small village in the countryside.
So many of the people I met said they felt betrayed: by family members, by their government, and even, some would complain, by God. I reflected that the capacity of individuals to manage hunger varies based on physical condition, social circumstances and personal history, personality, mental health, and even cultural norms. I once spoke with a woman from Somalia who had fled to Ethiopia with her four children. She told me, “Here we die by hunger; at home we die by bullets.” She was not at all emotional, and she immediately returned to the daily challenge of finding food and caring for her children. But in Armenia, I met a man who was despondent because he had been unable to afford a vaccination for his son, who later died. He described his circumstances by saying, “This is no way to live, but there is no way to leave.” Part of his agony came from being aware of modern medicine and knowing that money he once had—or perhaps even the old Soviet health system—might have prevented his son’s death.
At the time of my visit in 2005, World Vision told me that 40 percent of Armenians were living in extreme poverty as defined by the United Nations threshold of living on $1 a day. About another 30 percent of the population were twice as well off yet still below $2 per day. Those are staggering poverty rates, but not the worst that I’ve seen. What was so striking in Armenia was that so many poor people had once possessed some control of their lives and some confidence in the future. When Armenia was part of the USSR, it had built up a significant industrial sector, and it traded goods among the other republics. After independence, the country got tied up in conflicts with Turkey and Azerbaijan that led to those countries cutting off trade and isolating Armenia economically. Russia’s own economic struggles translated to smaller markets for Armenian goods, and the country tried to develop agriculture again, with mixed results.
Many Armenians toiled under a grim Soviet system, it was true, but at least many had access to enough food and decent services. Some people I met were even living in what were once at least middle-class apartments or homes—although in several cases, they were empty of possessions (which had been sold) except for one room where everyone living there would sleep and gather to try to stay warm. A small quantity of food might be kept on an outside porch, with someone assigned to keep an eye on it. The sense of loss was overwhelming.
In many ways, these circumstances were luxurious compared to the gutters of Calcutta, India, or refugee camps in Ethiopia, but we saw little reason for optimism anywhere. The disbanding of the Soviet Union had brought democracy to Armenia, it was true. But the people experienced democracy as the freedom to live without health care, the freedom to go hungry, and the freedom to be forgotten. Many older people, many of whom looked as if they could have been neighbors of mine in Omaha or Decatur, indicated that their lives had been lived in vain. This despondency was a stark contrast to evenings I have spent in a poor African village, where there can nonetheless be a sense of joy and hopefulness even among incredibly poor and hungry people.
In one Lori neighborhood, after we had finished with a scheduled visit, an older woman walking with a cane and shaking slightly got our attention. She asked us to come into her home. As we followed her up a set of decaying steps, we saw her sister in the doorway, a disturbing sight. She was clearly not well physically, and later we found out that she was also mentally ill.
We learned through our interpreter that these two women lived alone. The younger one who beckoned us in, Anna, was eighty-two, and the sister, Maria, eighty-four. Anna was wearing many layers of clothing and a tattered head scarf. Her bright blue eyes darted back and forth, and soon we would learn that she spent much of her waking hours with her guard up. The house was dirty and cluttered. We stepped over human waste on the floor. The first thing that Anna showed us was the rope she used to tie Maria’s door shut at night. It seemed that Maria became paranoid and violent at times and had tried to strangle Anna in her sleep. So Anna locked Maria in her room at night and slept on the porch, which was also their kitchen.
Anna went into a small closet and pulled out some papers, including a passport. She spoke of her family and began to cry. Her tears ran down her weathered, wrinkled skin, and it was difficult for her to stay composed. She was lonely, scared, and hungry. Among the papers were documents showing that Maria fought against the Germans in Russia during World War II. She operated an antiaircraft gun. Suddenly Maria began to speak for the only time, shouting, telling how she was never afraid, how she never left her post no matter how close the enemy got, and how proud she was to fight. With a wild-eyed intensity, she told us that she was one of the best shots. Then she fell silent, and Anna talked numbly about how Maria had become dangerous and insane.
I have never been anywhere in the world where more people opened their homes and their hearts than Armenia. This is Anna, a woman whose daily struggles deeply affected HWB and me. Photo: Howard G. Buffett
I am still moved by the thought of Maria clinging to her glory days as a soldier. I can’t help but think that for all the chaos and stress of war, she valued her emotional memory of that time as organized and civilized. Perhaps wearing a uniform, following orders, being part of a unit, being fed, might all have seemed like a privileged existence compared to freezing at night in that sad, unkempt room as she grappled with hallucinations and violent urges, fearing her own sister.
Anna spoke with some despair about the idea that they had done their duty to their government and fought for their country but had been forgotten.
“BE CAREFUL, HOWARD, IT IS PRECIOUS FOOD”
On a trip I took to Tavush Province, I visited a mother with four children living in a one-room shelter originally built for their animals. They could not finish building the house after fighting broke out among warring ethnic groups in the region, so they had been living in this shelter for years. At night in winter, the temperature can drop to the teens
or lower. The heat was from an archaic wood and dung heater that caused the children to cough heavily, and it barely raised the temperature to survivable.
My first memory of this visit was that there was a single ear of corn on the floor near the door. Like a lot of corn farmers, when I travel and see local corn, I will strip down the husk to check the kernels; or if I see an ear of picked corn, I will snap it in half to examine its structure and health. I picked up this ear and asked the mother if I could remove the husk to check it. She took it and stripped off the dry outer casing and handed it back; it was only about five inches long and only half pollinated. It had twelve rows of kernels, short of the eighteen that our farm at home would have. The in-country host traveling with me whispered, “Be careful, Howard, it is precious food.”
My second vivid memory was that the family had an eight-year-old son named Tatul. My colleague remembered him from an NGO camp the previous summer. He asked the boy what he liked the most about camp. Without hesitating, Tatul said, “The food.” I had the odd thought that such an answer would sound strange in the United States, where ridiculing the “chef’s surprise” and other aspects of camp cuisine is as much a ritual of the summer camp experience as bug bites and tipping a canoe. But as we talked, it was clear that camp was the only time in his entire life when he received three meals a day.
My final vivid memory of Armenia was when HWB and I met Shakhik. She said she worked forty years for the government on a large Soviet-style communal farm. She quit school at age ten in the fourth grade because her government needed her. She was now seventy-six and partially blind. Shakhik said she was devoted to her country but now had to make do with a pension of only about $26 a month—less than $1 a day. The communal farm had 350 families, and at least there she had help and companionship. As we got ready to leave, she felt it important to tell us that she would rather have cancer than be blind because then at least she would have died. Her eyesight prevented her from getting around well, but she clutched my face as we left and kissed me on the cheek. She thanked me for listening, for taking time to come see her.
40 Chances Page 11