Getting the kids to eat

There I was at the dinner table, trying to get the little monsters to eat some food. I almost gave up and trotted out Mum's favourite line from when I was a kid - "There are children starving in Africa at the moment who would be glad of what's on your plate".

Well, Mum was saying that over 30 years ago, and what's changed? Not much, except for my reluctance to use that phrase. Mainly because the reply would be, "Well, why don't we post it to them then?"

Funny how kids were starving in Africa when we were kids, and kids are still starving now, and given the way the idiots run the place, they'll still be starving when my grandkids start sitting down to dinner.

Africa seems to exist for one purpose only - to give parents a line to use at dinner when the kids won't eat. It's not much good for anything else. Kids were starving in China when I was a young-un, but today they are more worried about the toddlers being obese than stick-babies. Just shows what a bit of capitalism and economic growth can do for you.

I was thinking about famine in Africa, and our usual response. We get charities to load up lots of trucks with bags of flour or some other staple and they go trundling off to a dusty, fly blown camp in the middle of nowhere. The dust I can understand, since it is dry, but why all the flies? Is it because sanitation is non-existant and the ground is covered in crap as far as the eye can see? It's nice that TV cameras don't pickup smell, as no one would want to watch stories about starving stick babies if they could smell what the places are like. Maybe we should ship a few thousand fly traps as well.

Anyway, the next thing you see is all these people sitting around eating mealie-mealie off a plate, and not much else. Porridge is cooked up in great big kettles.

Then I thought - bugger me, what happens over here when people are going hungry? Do we ship them a big cast iron kettle and a bag of mealie-mealie? Nope. Poverty these days seems to be about not being able to afford a turkey at Christmas. The "hungry" end up having boxes and boxes of canned goods foisted upon them.

Hope they remembered to include a can opener.