25-28
EXAMPLE 3: In Lo Thana, mothers believed that young
children should not eat goat meat. The school teacher
believed that goat meat was a good food, so she tried
to teach the mothers to feed goat meat to the children.
But after a year, the same number of children were still
malnourished. Then the teacher learned that no one in Lo
Thana ate meat very often. Animals were killed for meat
only on special occasions. Usually people ate wheat or
beans. The real problem was that the family fields did
not produce enough wheat and beans. Lo Thana really
needed help with farming, not lessons on feeding children
goat meat.
These 3 stories Tell about problems that could be solved inside the community.
However, in some areas the causes of the biggest food problem come from
outside the community. Here are examples from the Browns:
EXAMPLE 4: On the edge of a large city was a poor neighborhood called
Tintown. There was no space for gardens, so people bought all their food
in markets and stores. But food prices were so high that the families
were never able to buy enough. The main cause of the high prices was
middlemen. The middlemen were people between the farmers in the country
who raised the food and the families in Tintown who ate it.
Here is how maize meal got to the families of Tintown. Out in the country,
women grew maize in their fields. When the maize was dry, they put it into
sacks. A young man bought the sacks of maize and took them to a shed in the
village. The owner of the shed bought the sacks and kept them in his shed. A
truck came, and the truck driver picked up the sacks and took them to the mill.
The mill owner ground the maize into meal and put it back into sacks. Another
truck driver took the sacks to the big market. A young man bought a sack of
maize meal and took it on a bus to Tintown. There he opened the sack and sold
the meal to 6 market women. The market women took the maize to the Tintown
market and sold it to the mothers.
All these people between the farm women and
the Tintown mothers were middlemen. Every time
the maize passed from one person to another, the
price went up. The Tintown people needed to avoid
some of these middlemen. So they found
a man with a small truck who would bring
sacks of maize from the farms directly to
Tintown. The families could buy
sacks of maize at a lower cost, and
the women themselves pounded
it into maize meal. The problem for
Tintown families was really outside
Tintown. By working together,
they found a way to attack the
problem.