by Clarens Renois
BALAN, Haiti, Nov 17, 2009 (AFP) - The women of Balan dream of feeding their children three times a day but many in the Haitian town must survive on just one daily meal.
As the United Nations food agency meets in Rome to discuss ways to ease hunger worldwide, the people of Balan in this poverty-stricken Caribbean nation are suffering the effects first-hand.
"We are all effectively on hunger strike," said Luc Louisville, describing the daily experience of women in Balan, a large town close to Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, where residents live in extreme poverty.
"We only eat once a day, when we can. Today, for example, I have not eaten all day," she said at 2:00 pm.
Louisville, 59, is a mother of five who works as a cook in a small school while her husband, a farmer, works in the fields.
She dreams of being able to serve three meals a day at home "like a normal person," but struggles to feed her family. "Sometimes we eat nothing more than a little bit of millet," she said.
"Often, we don't even have oil to cook with," said another local woman named Vanyse.
A mother of four, she is in her fourties and grows vegetables to sell in Port-au-Prince so she can buy food and pay for her children to attend school.
"To stay healthy we need meat, flour, vegetables and juice," she said, counting out the items on her fingers. "We have none of that here," she adds. "It's a forgotten region. We have been abandoned."
Balan is just 30 kilometers away from Haiti's capital and the seat of government, but state services are nowhere to be seen. Neither electricity nor water is provided.
The town, located on an arid plain covered with thorns and cut through with muddy trails, is home to more than 7,600 families who live in shanties covered with dry straw or tin roofs at constant risk of famine.
According to official figures, food insecurity affects more than a quarter of Haiti's population, some 1.9 million people, with women and children the worst affected.
The Food and Agriculture Organization, which began a three-day conference in Rome on Monday, has designated Haiti as one of the world's most economically vulnerable countries.
In Balan, when two World Food Program (WFP) vehicles rolled into town recently to supervise the cafeteria at a small public school, residents rushed to meet them, hoping for food.
The WFP serves one meal a day to more than 500,000 Haitian schoolchildren, providing them with what is often their only meal of the day. The organization also feeds 100,000 women who are pregnant or breastfeeding and 50,000 children under the age of five.
As the vehicles approached the school, a small crowd gathered in the courtyard.
The women were mostly older, some of them widows. Some of them appeared stunted, others were suffering from illness, their skin covered with sores.
They rise early every day, trying to find a way to gather enough food for their families.
"Look at my body, I'm nothing but skin and bones," said Immacula Mathurin, a mother of 11.
"We should be with our men in the fields, but the farmland is not producing anything," another woman added.
For the girls of Balan, a difficult future awaits. Most abandon their studies early, and many quickly bear children they cannot feed.
"My own daughter has given birth to three children. She didn't want to continue at school, even though I did everything I could to push her as far along as possible," said Vanyse, sighing.
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Copyright (c) 2009 Agence France Presse
Received by NewsEdge Insight: 11/17/2009 04:46:58
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