Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Jennifer McCarthy, who's studying what it takes to survive in drought- and poverty-stricken northern Afghanistan. As part of her thesis, the Canadian academic is living on a dollar-a-day in the country's Faryab Province and writing a blog about it.
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MARCO WERMAN: Pakistan's neighbor, Afghanistan, is one of the poorest nations of the world. Poverty is especially widespread in Northern Afghanistan, and it's especially severe now. Drought and soaring food prices have left hundreds of thousands of Afghans in a daily battle to survive the winter. Jennifer McCarthy is both studying and living the experience. The Canadian is making do in Faryab Province on a dollar a day. It's part of her PhD for Kings College, London. Jennifer, this is day number 6 on your dollar a day in Afghanistan program. What did you have for dinner today?
JENNIFER MCCARTHY: I had some boiled rice, a handful of salad greens, two small carrots which were delicious, and some lentil soup. I really did want some fruit and yogurt at the end of the meal, but both those items are far beyond my reach.
WERMAN: Is a dollar a day what most Afghans spend on food, and are they kind of eating as nutritiously as you are? ‘Cause that sounds like a pretty decent meal.
MCCARTHY: I would wager that most Afghans have far less than a dollar a day to spend on food itself. My little experiment is using a dollar a day for food and water. However, Afghans who are living in these conditions for much longer periods of time do have to use this money, in other words, for food or water, but for heating, energy for cooking be it gas or wood, access to medicine, education, clean drinking water can be very expensive. All of these resources need to come out of the very paltry sum of a dollar a day. And ultimately they eat two meals a day, and they realize that if they have a lunch, then there's no way they can actually have dinner that night.
WERMAN: And aside from the actual volume of food that the Afghans are able to afford, do you think that they view food differently in these situations? That it's not kind of about nutrition, and it's not about, you know, the food pyramid, but it's about just fuel for the body?
MCCARTHY: That's right. There is an emphasis on just getting as many calories as you can to get you through the day. And it's very much about having access to oil and cooking in oil. For example, a common dish is rice that would be cooked in oil. And the more oil you can afford to put on your food, the better it is, therefore the more calories you will get. The fat and the calories to sustain you are priority.
WERMAN: You're also keeping a daily blog of your experience, Jennifer, and listeners can find a link to it at theworld.org. Let me just read one of the observations you had from yesterday, day number 5. “One thing I am learning about myself is that I am a hoarder, or maybe just selfish. Where I would normally, for example, offer one of my few walnuts when a visitor arrives, I instead hide the precious protein-filled gems from view and keep them for myself.†Do the Afghans living around you typically share food outside their own family even in conditions like this?
MCCARTHY: Absolutely they do, and that is what I find so striking. Now that I've had a very, very small peek into the world of poverty, I'm astonished and very much humbled by how generous people are. Anytime you go to anyone's house in this area, you're automatically offered tea and sweets. People ask you repeatedly to stay for meals and to stay for the night. They want to have you as a guest and they want to treat you very well. I've been in households who have tried to convince me that they want to kill their last chicken for me so that I can have some meat, where they maybe haven't had meat for months. I'm very much humbled by this.
WERMAN: Your experience there, Jennifer, kind of reminds me of American reporters who have lived on the streets to feel what it's like to be homeless. But as you know, once the experience is over, you go back to your usual life, which is not about living on a dollar a day or living in a cardboard box. And I don't mean to judge the methodology of this, but I would like to hear you tell us what you think are the ways to begin to make a nutritious lifestyle kind of a sustainable thing in Afghanistan in a way that addresses the country's poverty at the same time.
MCCARTHY: That is a really good question. And I think that it may be about education, but I think the more urgent point is about securing people's livelihoods and helping them get themselves to this position, where they can make a choice and say, “I can have this really meaty and satisfying plate of galu, or I can go out to the market and buy fresh vegetables and fruit to make a salad.†Right now, people don't have that choice.
WERMAN: PhD candidate Jennifer McCarthy, living on a dollar's worth of food a day in Faryab Province in Afghanistan. Thanks very much for speaking with us, Jennifer.
transcript
Jennifer McCarthy's blog
