Ingrained with grain fear

LUNA K.C.

They say now the world is a different place. Is it so? I wonder. Nevertheless, humankind has reached a zenith of technological advances, from a remote-controlled robot to the hybrid rice on my lunch plate. But, sufferings are also getting new identities in this new millennium: climate change, food insecurity are some of the emerging problems.

Grown and brought up in the eastern world, enculturation of certain values and norms is quite normal to me. It’s a bad omen in my culture to leave food on one’s plate, and you must finish it. No leftovers! I am bound to this vow every single day and make sure I don’t leave any mess on my plate. But, one fine morning I didn’t feel like eating, and I’d had to break my kitchen rules, for which, my mother told me, “This is not good, when you waste one grain of rice, you’ll have to pay for it some day. Think of the poor who don’t have little to eat. We can save grains for them.” The last remark about the hungry people was something distracting to me. Living an urban life doesn’t certainly enlighten me to the real life situation in the rural areas, those living in geographically inaccessible parts of my country. There is a chronic food scarcity in the mid and far western parts of Nepal I’d read somewhere. I goggled in the internet to get a glimpse of the severity of food scarcity.

When I get paranoid about food safety and hygiene at my home, the folks in the famine-driven districts prioritize food security. I realized my mistake of throwing food in the trash. Had it been made available to any of those empty tummies, it would have been a blessing. Jajarkot, Achham and Dailekh are the major districts worst affected by food shortage. I went through a piece of news where a local woman from Jajarkot shared her biggest fear of how and what to feed her children each day. There’s no guarantee that her little ones would get fed at least twice a day. Here she didn’t care about herself, because she is a mother.

I tried to trace the events these women go through, in general. With no education and no

proper guidance, these women get married at a very early age, give birth to many children and lead a very crude life. There’s a growing trend of males of these districts migrating. As a result

of which, these women are,

literally, in a state of nowhere. From morning till midnight, they have to play different roles from a doting father to a loving mother.

Though I’ve not yet reached these hunger-driven places of Nepal, I’ve tried to envision those voiceless women. They have to stay with what they get as aid from donors or government-subsidized commodities.