Go: [ Home | Previous | Archive | Gods & Myths | Cafes | Coffee | People | Arts ]

Airblogging: Remembering Biafra

5:38 PM Tuesday, September 27, 2005

[A health-nut's sad flashback to the 1960's]

A little while back I did a cold start entry for the Coffeeblog, starting to write without knowing what I'm really going to write about. At this moment (mid-morning on September 24) at 35,000 feet on an American Airlines flight from California to the Midwest, bound for a family wedding, I'm doing it again. As I start I'm fuming at the airline: on the website itinerary they has declared "food available on board for a charge." I remembered "meals" instead of food, and naively assumed that "meals" everywhere in the world, except for the most impoverished areas, consist of protein, fat, and carbohydrate. American Airlines' "food" consists entirely of carbohydrate and fat, mostly the former. You have to pay three bucks for low-protein "snack packs". They did give out free "breakfast bars" consisting of trans-fat, three different kinds of sugar, and rolled oats. Up to how I never considered myself a health-food fanatic, but, being from California, I guess I am.

Writing about airline-food protein deficiency is taking me back to a memory of the sixties, and the Biafra War. The eastern part of Nigeria had attempted to secede and form their own nation, which they called "Biafra." Nigeria used their military to crush the rebellion (as the US did in the War Between the States), but it took time: years, as I recall. Meanwhile the nations of the so-called "International Community" lined up either for or against Biafra, mostly against. The Biafrans were well-educated and Westernized, and many international NGO's and ad-hoc organizations attempted to come to their aid, not with arms, but with food. You see, areas of Biafra were cut off from food supplies. Pictures of bloated, dying children began to appear in the international press. They had developed "kwashiorkor", a severe protein deficiency which causes hair to turn prematurely white. Like many idealistic twenty-somethings then and now, I wanted to "do something to help" while having, of course, my own little personal adventure. I managed to find funding which took me as a volunteer to the Republic of the Ivory Coast, an African country which has set up refugee camps for Biafran children. I spent a month in such a camp, where I discovered to my horror that the children were being fed a gruel of boiled rice with sugar. Collaborating with some adult Biafran volunteers, we bought black-eyed peas in the local market, and fed the kids an African-style meal, complete with African-style seasoning. I can still hear the cheer that rose up from all those kids when they found what there was to eat that particular day. Sad to say, I was unable to stay long enough to find out what had happened to the meals or the kids. The meal we prepared was supposed to be a "demo" meal within the camp's official budget, but whether it was ever repeated is unknown to me.

As I write this we're about two hours from the Midwest destination. I'm one of the holdouts from the low-carb fad (they say it's dead, but I don't believe it), so there's nothing on the plane that I want to eat. The flight attendant told me that American Airlines no longer serves peanuts like Southwest Airlines does, due to fear of peanut allergies. I'm not annoyed or even hungry any more: realizing how much better off I am than those Biafran children puts things in perspective. And you can bet that there are still children with kwashiorkor in Africa, and elsewhere, only you don't see their pictures in the papers any more. On the return flight I'm going to bring my own food, which is more than the Biafran kids and their present-day counterparts will be able to do.

| Technorati Tags: Nutrition Africa Hunger Nigeria

Go: [ Home | Previous | Archive | Gods & Myths | Cafes | Coffee | People | Arts ]

Copyright ©2004-2005 Jonathan David Leavitt