With poverty, hunger forces people to make difficult choices. Choices that further push them into poverty. Choices like letting the elder child stay at home to baby-sit the younger siblings as the widowed mother needs to be out in the streets begging for alms. Families eat seeds that should be preserved for the next sowing season. Food scarcity also jeopardises the well-being of families. Families substitute nutritious foods like vegetables and fruits for staples like wheat and millet.
The effects of hunger supersede health. With poor nutrition comes poor performance in school. Opportunities are missed. The foetus in the mother’s womb suffers from her malnutrition. The children suffer physiologically with stunted growth, not to mention the brain which suffers irreparable damage. Malnutrition weakens the immune system, making an already vulnerable child now prone to cholera, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria etc.
A third of all deaths in children under the age of five in developing countries are linked to undernutrition. To tackle this, Seven Spikes distributes food packs to people from disadvantaged backgrounds through our food aid program.
We sometimes provide a fixed financial help towards food, sometimes provide food staples and sometimes a combination of both. Our food aid packs provide impoverished and deprived families with a month’s supply of food staples, including rice, wheat, oil, dates, lentils and other essentials.