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In Africa, One Family's Struggle With the Global Food Crisis
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After she stripped the tree, Bamogo walked home through the fields, her son on her back, and a couple of goats on a rope lead.
Bamogo was tending the goats for a neighbor; her family's only animals are five skinny chickens. With food so scarce, Bamogo treats the chickens as something like a savings account -- they can be eaten if things get desperate.
She arrived at her small home 45 minutes later and allowed herself to sit for a moment. Her home is three small mud-brick huts with tin roofs, surrounding a dirt courtyard. One leaks so badly that it's abandoned. One is just a kitchen, its walls thick with black soot from an open cooking fire.
The mud walls are so worn down by pounding rains and relentless sun that they look like eroded sand castles.
The family sleeps in a two-room hut with a concrete floor. It is virtually empty except for a few bits of clothes, a New Testament and an old kerosene lamp.
The only decoration is a cartoon torn from a magazine that Bamogo's young boys stuck to the wall. It shows candy, tomato paste, powdered sugar and salted fish -- like a wish list of goodies the children have never seen.
"The situation is tougher than it has ever been," Bamogo said. "We cannot eat and be full like last year."
It was after 6 p.m. and the family had not eaten since breakfast -- and that was just a few bits of to, a bland cornmeal mush seasoned with wild leaves. Bamogo said she held back at breakfast, leaving more for the children, especially Jacob, the 4-year-old.
"The mother has to fight for everything," Bamogo said. "You don't want people to know your children are hungry, so you have to fight."
Things have never been bountiful in this village, but a year ago Bamogo said her family had three meals a day, and those regularly included rice and meat, with tomatoes and onions and other fresh vegetables.
A drought and then severe flooding devastated harvests across the country last year. Then on top of that, international market factors far beyond their control have pushed up the price of everything.
A recent study by the aid group Catholic Relief Services found that many people in Burkina Faso are now spending 75 percent of their income on food; in Bamogo's house, it is closer to 100 percent.
