Nutrition teams finish home assessments of food security

Megan and Sydney here-the UPEI nutrition interns for 2013.  After a long and eventful month, the food security assessments of 2013 are officially under wrap!    We have visited homes of 26 women from the Muchui and 12 women from the Ruuju Women’s Self Help Groups. During our visits, we have assessed women’s food security using a standardized validated questionnaire which assesses everything from their worry about having enough food for their families to how often they have ate less, missed meals or entire days of food or went to bed hungry.  

Doing our first interview with Penina in Ruuju

We have also assessed what they are eating, and how often they are having the nutritious foods grown in their shambas (farms), with the help of Farmers Helping Farmers agricultural projects. (More on that in another blog!) 

After doing 38 interviews, we have come to love and respect these women and for the hard work they do day after day just to keep food on their table for their families. They greet us warmly with big smiles, and often give us Kenyan tea, or insist that we take a papaya or eggs home with us.  We have noticed a substantial difference between the two communities. Even though the communities are only 1 hour apart, the climate, the resources and the people are very, very different. It is dry in Muchui, but most of the women have a substantial amount of land and screen houses or greenhouses. In Ruuju it is very tropical, but the women have very little land and most of them do not have screen houses or greenhouses.  From what we have seen, Muchui is far more food secure than Ruuju. Many of the Muchui women are able to eat the kinds of foods they prefer and the kinds of foods that they need. Most of the women answer ‘no’ to the questions ‘did you go to sleep hungry at night’ or ‘was there ever no food to eat of any kind’. However, they are still answering ‘yes’ to ‘did you worry that your household would not have enough food’.  It appears that almost all women, no matter what community they are from, are worried to some extent about where their next meal will come from. 

We gave every woman we interviewed a bottle of fortified vegetable oil as a small token of our appreciation. This is Purity, who is a very successful farmer!

The good news is that we have observed a strong correlation between the condition of their crops, and their food security levels. Basically, the healthier the crops are, the more food secure the women tend to be.

The women of Ruuju seem to be far more food insecure. Almost all of the women are only eating two, small meals a day and all of which have very little nutrient value. The women are answering ‘yes’ to ALL of the questions being asked about food security, and it is happening over 10 times per month. This is WAY too often.   

Interviewing Sarah in Ruuju under a canopy of banana trees. Our amazing translator Rosemary is in white.

One woman that we interviewed last week in Ruuju, sticks out in my mind (Sydney) as she has been the most food insecure that I have seen so far. I keep meeting and interviewing women and I think “it could NOT get any worse than this”… but, unfortunately, It does. Some of the stories are inspirational and some of the stories are absolutely heartbreaking. Anyway, when we arrived at the woman’s house in Ruuju, her son came up to Megan and I and passed us a note written in English. Half of the page he used to thank us for all we have done (I suppose he means FHF and the previous nutrition students) and that he and his mother are so appreciative. The end of the letter went on to ask us if we were able to pay for his education so that he could get a better paying job and help out his mother. At first I thought it was really awkward and inappropriate that he gave us the letter…until we interviewed his mother. I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures. It is she and her 15-year-old son living in the house. The house was nothing more than a wooden box with a roof and some foam on the floor to sleep on.  We couldn’t sit inside because there was nowhere to sit. So we resorted to sitting on the edge of the chicken coop. This woman’s 24h recall consisted of rice, beans, water and passion fruit. That’s all she had to eat for the day and that is most likely all that she has to eat most days. She said her last good harvest of maize and beans was in August of 2012! This explains why she has become so food insecure. Her crops are not growing now, she does not expect to have a good harvest this season, and we can only hope the season after this one, will bring a miracle. This woman reported to going to sleep hungry over 10 nights in the past month, she often has no food to eat of any kind, and she has also often had to eat smaller and fewer meals then she felt she needed. It was heartbreaking to see this.  When we left her property, she ran into her house and came out carrying about 15 avocados with huge grin on her face. I looked over at Rose (our translator) and said that I didn’t want them, that I wanted this woman keep her avocados and to eat them everyday. Rose said I had to take them and that it was this woman’s only way to say thank you to us. It would have been rude if I had not taken them. So Megan and I took the avocados, and left the smiling woman behind. I wish that I could come back every year and work with the women, and personally see the changes we are making. I wish there was more that I could do.  (Jen sent money for a bag of maize for her, which will help in the short term…) It is especially hard for me (Megan) to go into their homes and see how hard they work but then go out into the community and see men sitting around the shops doing nothing but chewing Khat (a drug that is legal here).

A typical scene with men gathering at the shops

             In 2012, nutrition interns (Janet Gamble, Samantha Smith and Fergie Wallwin) found that women with a screen house or a greenhouse were less likely to report high levels of food insecurity compared to women without a screen house or greenhouse. For example, the number of women reporting experiencing anxiety about having enough food, reduced quality of food and reduced quantity of food these concerns was significantly lower among the women with screen houses or greenhouses compared to those who didn’t have them. These findings suggest that the presence of a screen house or greenhouse significantly buffers the negative impacts of poverty and crop conditions.  We are just now analyzing the data from this year’s interviews, and will be preparing a report for Farmers Helping Farmers so that they can see whether their initiatives (funded by CIDA) have continued to have this positive impact. Based on what we observed, we expect more good news about the impact of this agricultural and nutrition project.  

A Screen house, which protects crops from birds, insects and harsh sun and wind!

The two Biology students, Alicia and Jen, accompanied us on the Muchui home visits. (We did the Ruuju interviews ourselves).  By having them come to the interviews with us, we were able to learn a lot about why they were here, and the benefits of the energy efficient stoves provided by Farmers Helping Farmers. We will leave it to Alicia and Jennifer to talk in more detail about that!

I (Megan) am so grateful to these women for allowing us to come into their homes and get some insight into the way they live their lives. These women are extremely strong , and it is meeting them in their homes that have given us a real Kenyan experience that would not have been possible had we traveled here for any other reason. One of my favorite parts about walking to the women’s shambas (farms) were the children we would see along the way: they are so well behaved and happy whether they are rolling a tire down the side of the road for fun or working and carrying a bag of maize on their back.  Overall, even though they have been hard sometimes, we have loved doing the home assessments and we are sad to see them come to an end.

Our next project, which we are excited to get started on, is an infant feeding video for the hospital here in Kiirua. This video will focus on breastfeeding and infant feeding.   Stay tuned for our experience on directing a video in Kenya…it could get interesting!

Megan and Sydney (Meggie and Sydee)