Plan Australia

27-July-2005

Niger: Personal stories of the famine

A grandmother (eighty years old):
"It was one day at noon; the sky was covered with locust just like clouds. Men, women and children were afraid. Locusts invaded our farms and our houses. People didn.t know what to do, or where to go. Never in my life have I seen such a thing. An hour was enough for them to finish up a farm. Locusts are yellow and bizarre.

"We have not been able to do anything except simply remain in the village. Most of the young people and the ones with enough strength to walk have migrated to the coasts [Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast], only the old people and the very young have remained in the village.

"The famine is due to the locusts. When they came they ate everything; millet, grass even the earth. I have never seen anything like this. We have nothing to eat except leaves and herbs. But is it only recently that we have been able to eat the leaves, since the rain started..

	Baki (13 years old) "I ate leaves for lunch because of the famine; the famine was caused by the locusts so my parents don.t have anything from the crops. All of the families are trying to survive by eating herbs and bran [usually this is given to animals, bran from millet and maize]. We get the bran from the market. The famine brought about disease in the village, many diseases."
	Sherifa (10 years old): "We are trying to survive by weaving plates and mats and with that we go to the market and sell them in order to buy bran; because this is cheap. It is difficult to sell the mats and sometimes we have to travel too far to sell them. We sell them for 200 CFA." [50 cents approximately]
	Djafarou (13 years old): "I used to go to school, but gave up because of the famine. My family has nothing to eat. I can not go to school without something to eat. We are making cords to sell. We didn.t get anything from the fields; we are surviving on herbs and bran."
	Sayatou (14 years old): "It was the first time that we had seen locusts like this. It was like a plague. They were like clouds in the sky and they covered the trees and the earth. This is the first time in my life I have seen locusts. We thought it was the end of the world. We didn.t know where to go or what to do."
	Village Chief (71 years old): "We are surviving on leaves and bran the situation is so tough that we can not cultivate the land because you have to eat to have the energy to farm. Sometimes we can go two days without eating. Last year I cultivated four farms, but we didn.t get any crops from the farms..