Emma
Woman robbed by starving people yesterday at the market in Malawi Last night at a market in Malawi, which is currently suffering from a great famine, a woman got robbed of all her cakes, that she had made as a desperate attempt to try to keep her family from starving. While the woman was taking orders, people were snatching cakes from her basin, eventually leaving her with no cakes left and almost no money. Malawi, a country in south-east Africa, is currently suffering from a famine that is spreading rapidly across the country. Because of a drought that caused a failure of the harvest of maize, people have slowly been running out of food to eat, and the situation is becoming desperate for the Malawian people. The woman who was robbed, Agnes Kamkwamba, is a mother of seven children. In order to feed the size of her family some action had to be taken, because the stock of maize is running out. Kamkwamba decided to start baking cakes in order to earn some extra money to buy more food for her family. Unfortunately, there were too many starving people from even more desperate conditions at the market, who didn’t think of paying Kamkwamba for all the effort she went through baking the cakes, and without thinking they simply took what they could. “They took almost everything. There won’t be much tonight”, Kamkwamba said when asked about the situation. After us talking to her she started walking home, trying to think of a way to tell the rest of her family about what happened and why there won’t be any more food. In Africa, especially in Malawi, where people are so dependent on nature and the success of the harvests, these kind of famines are bound to happen. People don’t have access or money to buy food everyday, and therefore they need to grow it themselves. Of course, that means that the food they grow is organic, and they can make money by selling it. It also provides a safety for them, because they don’t depend on transportation and the supply of the supermarkets like people from cities do. However, there are negative aspects of being dependent on your own harvests as well. That means that if there is a drought, such as there was in Malawi, and all of the harvests fail the people are in a desperate and dangerous situation, like the one Agnes Kamkwamba is in.