So Much To Learn…

The UN World Food Programme has had to halve the rations to refugees in several African refugees camps, although it has already been doing that in other camps, since May in Uganda and Tanzania. The reason is a funding shortfall mainly due to donor fatigue. Most camps restrict the movement of the refugees making it difficult for the camps to develop some kind of self sufficiency. On the Kenya-Somalia border lies the Dadaab camp, there since the 1990’s, a camp set up for 90,000 which now has over 500,000. At a recent conference addressing the future options for the camp, exploring ways to making it more self sufficient was forefront on the agenda, but there was no consensus, because Somalis aren’t allowed to work in Kenya. And then there’s us, with what appears to be soft antiseptic lives, where we are free to indulge delicacies and whims, where every kitchen among those I know displays abundance and where too many of us waste food if not other necessities. I wonder, do we savor what we eat more than the refugees do their meager rations? They must envy us. We may not envy them, yet have so much to learn from them.