The Platinum Blonde Pigeon
Fernley, not his real name, yet everyone calls and knows him as Fernley. Master of Hydrogen peroxide
Cycling along the River Clyde cycling out of Glasgow. Though the derelict industrial landscape that shaped this town and underpins its current identity one noticed shed like towers. These structures too tall to be garden sheds, too makeshift to be electrical transistor stations are purpose build spaces of some sorts. What are these huts? Who is using them? For what purpose?
It turns out these are pigeon lofts holding highly regarded collections of “hens” and “cocks” Pigeon. Breeding these birds was immensely popular amongst male industrial workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Fernley Is dying his pigeons’ feathers from a Payne grey to a bright blond. “Just as your misses get her hair done for the night out, I make this hen looking great” he accounts. Using Hydrogen peroxide, he achieves the most desirable “platinum blonde” around.
Decolourizes, the pigment in the feathers, is loaded with danger as the birds can suffer the loss of feathers, swollen skin or lose sight if the bleach enters their eyes. If any of these occurs precious jewel in the collection of a fancier or it dies, Fernley is in danger accusations can escalate to fights, killing his birds, fistfights and even stabbings he tells me. “Once a consumer try to set fire to his pigeon loft at night,” he tells me. “The quest for superior beauty at the end of it, however, makes the worth risk”.
The desire for the authentic blond, bridges from the bird to the human species, Nordic gentlemen favouring of the blond type is well documented through the ages. Famously natural blond and beautiful Rosalie Duthé, born in France in the mid-eighteenth century and raised in a convent, She allegedly once turned the head of the affluent English financier 3rd Earl of Egremont, to such desire that he kidnapped her and brought her back to England, only to end up in bankruptcy and madness. Although this blond tale is probably a myth, blondes do not seem to have lost any of their popularity since. Research suggests that blondes feature more often on magazine covers than any other type. Asserting the notion, that we humans are attracted to the exotic. Most minorities (only 2% of humankind are natural blond) are both reviled and revered by society.
Rock Pigeons, the ancient relatives of racing pigeons, nonetheless, come only in shades of grey. Not blond, the desire of the “pigeon fancying” keepers must be achieved by using aggressive chemicals. The delicate timing and dosage make Fernley’s dying feather skills invaluable in the peruse of the perfect Platinum Blonde. Praised and well thought after he is a master in turning grey feathers into a beautiful and desirable fledgeling, His flock can be recognised from far away flying in the sky. “A young hen is jealously guarded by her cock”.
Pigeon breeding was immensely popular amongst male industrial workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pigeon breeding and racing offered not only the thrills and excitement but also the more sedate and intellectual rewards of spawning and rearing the birds. The pigeon loft was and is a masculine enclave and a retreat from the pressures of domestic life for some, although for others it was an opportunity to share time with their family. For some working-class men, pigeons are a vent to open displays of emotion, contrasted uncomfortably with the more suppressed relations that workers presented to their spouses and children.
Successful pigeon racers indeed won both self-esteem and the respect of their peers. Successful “pigeon fancying” is spoken of in revered tones years after their death. Pigeon thus a route to a more positive self-identification that is too often denied in unbecoming work that followed the downfall of male defining manual professions in the retired heavy industry.
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Struggle to Find Work
Photo and Text: Samuel Hauenstein Swan – www.SamBronx-Photo.com
Part V of the Descendent of the Hyena Series.
The Story of Zara, we follow in this series typifies the struggle of many households in the village of Guidan Koura a community in Niger and further afield throughout the Sahel. For many small farmers like her, 7the food and cash gained from their agriculture are just not sufficient to feed their children all year round. They must search for additional work throughout the year. In many rural areas of poor countries, however, regular employment is impossible. With the start of every day, the Zara has to scrape by perhaps find work with a wealthier villager. Or collect wood and to sell it on the roadside, send some older children away to relatives to see for protection and food there.
The young ones remain with her. But there is the physicality of all the task which make it difficult to look after the little toddlers. “if I am strong I take one on my back, to collect wood or fetch water. Zara says. “but usually I must trust the older girls to look after the little ones, to keep them asleep, so they not noticed I am gone, and if they wake up give them some water, so they think they are not hungry and stop crying.” I can not keep up the breastfeeding as I am out the house for work most of the day and I have very little milk in my body when I am back. The poor nutrition is probably why so many of our baby fall ill with malnutrition and die in the dry seasons. Zara concluded thinking of her lost child (Part II of the Descendent of the Hyena Series). If all fails, we eat wild roots and leaves or I send the children to beg on strangers doors.
I have to go to work whenever I find some, no matter if I should look after my children or go to work on my farm. To weed or water the shoots. Poor people have no choice. To days work or lack of it is today’s food or a day of scarcity and hunger. This cycle then is the basic scenario for many rural people: living in a downward spiral of low productivity and resource degradation. But the picture would not be complete without considering how poor people try to cope and what this means for their future.
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18 Hour Day with One Meal Only
Photo and Text: Samuel Hauenstein Swan – www.SamBronx-Photo.com
Part IV of the Descendent of the Hyena Series.
We ask the elder in the villages about his daily routine in the growing season. “my wife and I get up at about five o’clock in the morning,” he begins, and head out right away to the fields, to beat the heat that is building up very quickly. We try to get most of the farm work – which is at that time of the year mostly weeding and ensure the soil is not to compact around the base of the plants, so the rain gets to the roots quickly – before one o’clock n the afternoon.
By the time we reach home, it is nearly two it is we have our first meal.
During the months where we have the most work on the farms, we also have the least reserves in the kitchen. We often have just that lunch meal, and in the evening we make some tea with sugar.
These hunger season meals lack both in quantity and quality. It is often just as much that a headache is going but never as much that we feel full. During this month of the year, it is only porridge we dilute with much water and give a bit of tasing by adding wild leaves and hot spices.
“Hunger in the village and the region has to do with poverty and secondary with rains.” Zara’s neighbours explain: ”the rain permit only one harvest. The better off villages have the low grounds close to the river and with fertile soil to make most of the few spots of rain. The others have the fields that are higher and on slopes where the water runs off, and the most fertile ground is missing. These areas give little and even in good years are sufficient to feed the family. They also have no surplus to bring to the markets and gain cash to purchase food later in the season. Once their stocks are empty Zara, and families like hers must hope for occasional work in exchange for a meal.
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Empty Rivers
Photo and Text: Samuel Hauenstein Swan http://www.sambronx-photo.com
Part III of the Descendent of the Hyena Story.
The vast majority of small-scale farmers in Subsaharan Africa depend on rain feed agriculture. Yet, around Zara’s village the rivers dry up, as soon they have swelled in the short rainy season, and water becomes scarce.
Most of the world’s economic weak families live in rural areas and work in agricultural and livestock economies. For these households, poverty, hunger and illness are highly dynamic phenomena, changing dramatically over the course of a year in response to production, price and climatic cycles.
As a result, most of the world’s acute hunger occurs not in conflicts and natural disasters but in that annually recurring time of the year called the ‘hunger season’, the period during the year when the previous year’s harvest stocks have dwindled, and little food is available on the market, causing prices to shoot upward.
Employment and economic opportunities are often scarce during the hunger season, and to make matters worse, in many countries this period usually coincides with the rainy season, when severe illnesses like malaria strike hardest.
Despite the importance of seasonal cycles throughout the rural developing world, development response is often homogeneous in type and amount throughout the year.
Seasonality is one of these leverage points. Interventions like pre-positioning nutrition and health resources, providing employment during the hunger period, and indexing benefits to prices will cost-effectively reduce poverty, hunger, child mortality and illness.
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Clémence’s soft toy
picture: www.sambronx-photo.com
Clémence is holding onto her soft toy Dalmatian Puppy, her mother gave her for Christmas. Children all over the world hold on to their cuddly toys for comfort in unfamiliar places. Clémence is no different.
I meet her and her mother, Anita, in the intensive nutrition unit of the pediatric hospital in Bangui, the Central African Republic. 29,250 children under 5 years suffering from acute malnutrition are admitted for therapeutic care. The principal referral centre of the capital is crowded with children that have fallen ill with the most severe and deadly form of malnutrition. There is little noise from these children: too ill to play, too weak to express discomfort.
At two and a half years old and 5.5 kg, Clémence is barely above the weight of a new born baby. I learned how she came here as her mother, Anita, props her up in her lap. A few weeks back she was a strong and joyful little child playing in the streets near her home. All changed when she caught malaria and lost appetite fighting the fever. Weakened by illness, she developed diarrhea and quickly lost weight to the point that her parents got very worried and brought her into the hospital, where they learned their child was suffering from severe malnutrition.
Severe malnutrition is one of the greatest challenges to child survival in the world today. Affecting 16 million children worldwide and responsible for up to two million child deaths each year, it is the most lethal form of malnutrition.
Clémence is clinging onto her Dalmatian toy when the nurse tries to move it to take the temperature. Her breathing is very quick and she seems to drift in and out of sleep. She is unable to move her head up and look around. Having worked with ACF for many years, the intensive nutrition units are the hardest, saddest places to visit. No child should ever fall ill with Severe malnutrition. It is the epitome of an unjust world: a place that produces more food that it can eat and has the knowledge to treat infections these children can no longer fight.
However, nutrition units are also places of hope. Last year 87% of children brought to our nutrition clinics in CAR recovered and returned home. ACF cured more than three million children around the world last year alone. Effective community treatment, equipped with products like therapeutic foods, reach children living in the most marginalised and conflict ridden areas of the world. Where the illness is extremely severe and complicated by infection as it was with Clémence, inpatient treatment with the supervision of ACF doctors and nurses around the clock is the only option. CAR has experienced high levels of violence that have devastated its health system and increased poverty, so only few referral centres are available.
Talking to Anita, a law student, she was hopeful that the treatment was working and there were some signs that her child was getting better. Trying to feed her was not easy, as Clémence was spilling much of the therapeutic milk and having difficulties even swallowing. Feeding ill children is a painfully slow and delicate process as any parents know. Here it is an act of desperation to save a child. My presence was not helping as Clémence was distracted. I left the hospital where Anita was hopeful that her daughter would gain weight and get back her appetite so they could return home. I felt hopeful that Clémence’s mother was right.
Arriving back in the UK I had some horrible, sad news from Central African Republic. Clémence died from severe malnutrition only days after I left her bedside. Her mum was doing her best. In a country that has high rates of illness, only few health care workers are at hand to help her to detect the early signs of malnutrition and get treatment. This Mother couldn’t prevent her baby from getting regular bouts of malaria or the diarrhea that followed and weakened her little girl, and led to the severe malnutrition. She is one case in about 700 malnutrition-related deaths per year in CAR.
We do save lives in our projects every day. Sadly we failed Clémence. Despite our best effort, too many children still do not make it through severe malnutrition. In 2015 Action Against Hunger treated 1,560,000 children: more than any previous year. We have to do even more. Anita, her story and pictures serve me as a reminder to raise awareness of the unspeakable injustices of malnutrition so many children in CAR and worldwide, battle with day in day out.
Action Against Hunger are part of a massive scale up and work with communities, donors and doctors to find children long before they are severely malnourished, to expand treatment into many more health centers in order for malnourished children to stand the best chance to be cured. Referral centers such as at the Bangui paediatric hospital partner with us to deal with overwhelming numbers of malnourished children.
Five year independence celebrated in hunger
Ongoing insecurity, high food prices, and major food deficits have pushed large numbers of already vulnerable people in South Sudan over the edge, leaving them struggling to meet their basic survival needs.
Powerful first voice video Link
all Video and photos: Guy Calaf for Action Against Hunger-USA
22 years old Agauwol Akec, sustenance farmer and mother of 5 children, collects weeds and branches to build a hut for a neighbor in the hopes of getting payed some small cash or some food, in her home village of Yargot, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, South Sudan on May 7th, 2016.
A town destroyed – Leer, South Sudan
Since fighting broke out in mid-December between rival army factions in South Sudan, plunging the new country into widespread conflict pitting communities against one another, thousands, perhaps as many as 30,000 people, have died; 1.5 million have been forced from their homes and around four million require humanitarian assistance, with food insecurity the main concern. Link
Bangui’s ghettos
Now, fewer than 1,000 remain in the city, the rest having fled amid a veritable pogrom carried out in reprisal for atrocities committed by an alliance of mainly Muslim rebels who had seized power in March 2013.
Those left behind are stuck in ghettos or makeshift camps, protected by African Union troops but still surrounded by units of hostile anti-balaka militiamen. Link
Hunger in Kenya
West Pokot, at the edge of the Rift Valley in Kenya, is a vast county where luscious green mountains meet scorched savanna. Action Against Hunger and the Kenyan Ministry of Health are supporting families with malnourished children across the county, as well as addressing some of the difficulties they face in accessing treatment. Photo by: Samuel Hauenstein Swan link
Kenyan farmers share their priorities in life – in pictures
Researchers from the climate change, agriculture and food security research programme of the Consultative Group on Agricultural Research and the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute recently held a series of workshops in east and west Africa to find out what matters to farmers, how they perceive their present and future challenges and how they can be empowered to tackle them. Here is how farmers from Othidhe village, in Nyanza province, south west Kenya, responded.
The series of photos will be officially launched at the Agriculture and Rural Development Day on Saturday 3 December in Durban, South Africa to coincide with the COP17 climate negotiations
memory by David Gillanders
memory
If it’s true that we humans learn from our mistakes in life then I should have been a genius at the age of 14. That’s according to my wee mum, who it must be said has had more than her fair share of worries since bringing me into the world. It was impossible for me to understand this until I had kids of my own.
I can still remember vividly the births of both of my sons and the overwhelming emotions that pulsed through me. The desire to keep them safe, to protect them, to teach them and give them better experiences and opportunities in life than I had. All of these emotions grow as your child grows, they develop as they do and become stronger.
It’s with this in mind that I want to write about the story behind a photograph I took in Malawi in March 2006.
I was spending a few weeks there with the charity Concern to make a photo story about dreadful food shortages which were blighting the country. Myself and a writer Alan Martin lived in a village called Mgwindhi, in central Nkhotakota, where we slept on the floor of the chiefs hut. It was an incredible experience where we were shown the most amazing hospitality and kindness by everyone we met. As part of our work we visited a clinic where we met a young woman called Enifa Banda. Enifa was 30 years old and had walked for days to attend the clinic with her 6 month old twin babies. The babies were called Mercy and Memory.
Even as I type this now I can’t make sense of the unbearable pain Enifa must have endured. Herself malnourished Enifa was producing hardly any breast milk for one child let alone two hungry babies. She had been forced to make an unthinkable decision. Enifa had to pick which child she should feed in attempt to keep one of her children alive. She named the child she fed Mercy, and the second child who was given no milk whilst she tried to find help was called Memory.
When Enifa made it to the clinic it was already too late for poor little Memory. In the photograph below Enifa cradles Mercy as Memory struggles for breath on the bed at her mothers side.
We heard later that Memory lived for a few hours after we left the clinic and then passed away at her mothers side.
A Question of Dignity: Kenyans for Kenya
Some parts of East Africa and the Horn are experiencing the worst drought in 60 years. In Kenya, a local initiative, Kenyans for Kenya, has rallied citizens to donate funds to feed the hungry; much of the money has been raised through cash transfers done by mobile phone. Caroline Mutoko, a presenter at KISS FM, one of the country’s biggest radio stations, has been one of the campaign’s most vocal supporters. In this film, she explains the objectives of Kenyans for Kenya.
http://www.irinnews.org/film/?id=4757&ThemeID=AFC
Thebronxpapers's Blog 
Any Spare Coin is Invested in Goats, Sheep and Camels
Photos and Text Samuel Hauenstein Swan – www.sambronx-photo.com
Part X of the Descendent of the Hyena Series. Full Story
Food aid has traditionally been the dominant form of assistance to people suffering from hunger. In the past decade, however, support in the form of cash transfers has become increasingly popular as an alternative to food aid, especially in Africa. The advantages of cash are many. Cash gives people more choices to the recipient than food, enabling them to meet a range of food and non-food needs, including health expenses, clothing, and – even in emergency situations – the purchase of livestock and other critical assets needed to build livelihoods. Herds small to big not only provide food directly, but they also guarantee an income flow, can act as a store of value enhancing risk-bearing capacity, and often have an inherent value linked to the status they confer to their owners. Farmers like Zara ideally invest there harvest surplus profit to gain animals which the resell if they face financial hardship, such as an illness, prolonged food deficit etc.
The nomadic communities around where Zara lives had once abundant and diverse herds. The “dry” years of the late 1980s and the first decade of the 21st century severely reduced the numbers and composition of the animals. Trying to recover in the aftermath of severe droughts is a long and tough process: buying young and healthy animals is beyond the means of all but the wealthiest. Losing their strong camels signifies diminishes the ability to move from place to place in search of water and pasture. In turns that result in heightened conflict between the villages and the nomads as the prolonged presence of animals and humans around limited water-points leads to increasing overgrazing, deforestation, and disputes over the usage of extensive plains.
Almost all evidence available highlighting positive effects of cash transfers, on livestock and inputs. The impacts on savings, ownership of animals were consistent highlighting positive results of giving distressed communities cash on hand at times of seasonal hunger.
Cash also has ‘multiplier effects’ in the economy: spending cash transfers will generate income and employment for others that not got the cash directly. Capital can help farmers protect their belongings and their production systems. prevent distress sales of animals and livelihood stimulate local food economies.
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January 26, 2018 | Categories: Analysis, commentry, Local Voices, photo | Tags: Africa, cash, cash transfers, climate change, drought, Environment, family, hunger, innovation, livelihoods, livestock, Niger, nutrition, Photojournalism, SAM, seasonality, severe drought, West Africa, Women | Leave a comment