Hunger Season

The cricket season followed the first rains. But they didn’t last. A couple of months of occasional downpours was enough to green up the grass and rejuvenate our struggling garden, but not enough to grow the life-giving crops. Now it is dry again and likely to remain so for a few weeks; hence the hunger season.

A small group of women meet on our verandah on Wednesday mornings for a short informal Bible study. Most of them do domestic work in the houses around here, and others are members of our local parish church. They are uniformly poor, engaging in subsistence farming with their families. In a mixture of Lugbara and English we sing, read a Bible passage, discuss, pray, and finish with a cup of tea – our sugar jar is always empty after Wednesday mornings! One of the women acts as translator both ways, as I have little Lugbara and some of them have little English. It’s always an encouraging experience to share with people who are hungry for some teaching, however brief, and who express a simple but profound faith.

The prayer requests illustrate the difficult lives they live. One woman had a field of cassava uprooted in the night – that represented her family’s bank account. Another said the neighbour’s goats had been eating her crops, and there had been arguments between the families. Another couldn’t find school fees for the orphans who were living with her family. But the biggest problem at the moment is ‘hunger’ and the lack of adequate rain – stalks of maize look fairly healthy, until you discover that they are all leaves, and the cobs that will feed the family are not developing. Groundnuts have withered before anything like a nut appeared. Stores of beans from last year’s harvest are running short. The next planting season is next month (provided it rains), but the harvest won’t be in until October.

So we pray that neighbours will tie up their goats, that fields will be protected, that school fees will be found, and for rain. It hasn’t come yet. But these women never waver in their trust in God. He will see us through, they say. They have seen hardship before. And our passage today? Consider the birds of the air...........your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they? (Matt 6:26)

It’s difficult, when the verandah is outside our little house – TV, computers, books, and a well stocked kitchen. The women never once cast an envious glance. But I am conscious that the loose change in my purse would buy them and their children a few meals. We give, yes, but it can never be enough, or sustainable against future ‘hunger seasons’.

Of course it’s a vicious circle of environmental degradation as well as the usual vagaries of weather and harvest. Trees are being cut down at an unsustainable rate to provide firewood and charcoal, still the commonest sources of fuel for cooking and washing. Land is increasingly scarce, and many people have no rights to the land on which they live, so risk eviction if a landowner is sufficiently unsympathetic. Soil is not enriched with any kind of fertiliser, so crop yield is low. Water sources are often polluted and streams reducing to a muddy trickle.

But the women still meet with a smile, and if we go to their homes we are never allowed to leave without being given some refreshment. “God is testing us”, they say, “but He will provide.”

We pray He does, soon.

We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land
But it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand........