Category Archives: Kenya

Sarah, my black market supplier

I have in my bag an incredibly exciting thing. Four beautiful, muddy, enormous hen’s eggs.

Everyone knows that in wartime, the black market did a roaring trade. The nylons, oranges and chickens handed over from the back of a lorry helped to break the monotony of wartime austerity, and supplemented a hungry family’s ration.

In the interests of fairness and the spirit of this challenge, I haven’t taken up offers of extra food. All except these four little beauties, which I can now admit was my one prearranged extra purchase during Lent. When your allowance is one egg a month, I can’t tell you how much it means.

Please help CAFOD help people who don’t have enough to eat. Give to our Lent campaign>>

Not that they came cheap (no pun intended). My black marketeer, aka Sarah, CAFOD’s campaigns writer, could name her price. She’s a bit inexperienced as a crook: she has charged me the princely sum of £1 donation to CAFOD per egg, and didn’t even recoup (again, no pun intended!) her 80p expenses.

When it comes to supplementing my rations ‘illegally’, I’m definitely not making a habit, but I do want to make a point.

Joseph Parsait lives in Kenya. During the dry season maize is very expensive. But he still has to buy it for himself and his family. He relies on others for his daily bread.

Nobody should go hungry when there’s enough for everyone. Let’s make a change this year.>>
Like me, Joseph has limited access to food. Like me, he has to pay whatever the sellers charge him. Unlike me, he doesn’t have a choice. He can’t opt out; if he doesn’t pay the high prices, he doesn’t eat.

He says: “If you buy, you stay alive. If you don’t buy, you die. You have to buy whether you like it or not.”

Times of crisis bring profiteers out of the woodwork, but they bring out heroes too. Joseph is my hero, because despite his hunger and his responsibility to his family, he can say: “I forgive those who sell to me at a high price. Because we know God, we have to forgive.”

You can see why people might charge those high prices. The profiteers are probably living with uncertainty: trying against the odds to support their families. Times are hard; people take what opportunities they can get, even at the expense of others.

Less forgivable perhaps, are the really big profiteers: the giant global companies who control the majority of the world’s food supplies and keep people like Joseph living in a permanently precarious state. They pay growers less than a living wage so they can cream off as much profit as possible. And they sell to their consumers at the lowest possible price. In turn, we don’t make a fuss because, let’s face it, we all like a bargain.

Joseph from Kenya

You might be tired of hearing me rant about this subject. But I’m not going to stop.

It’s no fun being hungry, even for a short while. In my very limited experience, what takes up your brain space when you’re hungry is, well, being hungry. So it’s not surprising that people pay exorbitant prices for food. It is scandalous that they have to.

I’d always imagined the black market as a rather quaint, cheeky affair: your slightly dodgy friend with an oddly shaped overcoat tipping you a wink and sorting you out with a few supplies. But actually, profiteering is an inevitable by-product of an unequal society.

This is a world where people are exploited twice over: firstly because they don’t earn a proper wage, and again because they pay too much to eat.

I’ve bought my eggs, knowing that I’m adding to my fundraising and that tomorrow I will enjoy a blissful breakfast of egg on homemade soda bread toast – a breakfast I will never again take for granted!

But profiteering in times of hardship isn’t just a bit of fun. It’s the result of an unfair food system. And that really is unforgivable.

Nobody should go hungry when there’s enough for everyone. Let’s make a change this year.>>

Claud Mba has worked in CAFOD’s digital communications team for three years. She lives with her husband in Kent and is a lifelong supporter of CAFOD’s work. This Lent she’s putting her love of 1940s style and culture to the test: getting sponsored to live on 1943 UK rations, in solidarity with people who don’t have enough to eat around the world.

You can read more about Claud’s challenge and sponsor her here: http://www.justgiving.com/claudonrations