Mud pie...

There's one thing that has disturbed me a few days. By "disturb" I don't mean shaken and slightly appalled, I mean a thought that moves me deeply and that keeps returning untill I can't keep quiet. It's the fact that people on Haiti are eating mudcakes. No, they're not having desserts, they're eating slices of chalk clay to survive. Real food are imported and too expensive for many.

When I did my research for this post I soon encountered an all too familiar pattern, clumsy free trade policies (the flow of cheap, imported food have crushed the national farmers), unstable government, corruption and bad infrastructure that makes most of the aid from relief organisations stay in the harbour storehouses of Port au Prince. Plus, of course, the inflation, that made the crisis grave. A complicated background to a catastrophy, with a lot of others to blame, which makes it easy to not help at all (since there's allways something better to do or someone with still redder hands to hang).

And that's how the world is. Complicated. But while we are bickering about the bestest packages of measures, political colour of antagonists and who to blame people are starving, not only in Haiti but over the entire world - and they're doing it now.

Usually I keep this blog on easy reading level; everyday topics and nothing deeper than a plant pot (unless I'm deep digging my allotment), which is why I'm going to concentrate on those tiny things that helps in tiny ways. There may be a big wastage on the way, but I hope that the more that is sent, the bigger the chance that some food parcels arrives to the right reciever.