Niger Famine and Regreening

    FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: At eight a.m. each day, the weigh-in begins at a regional health center. Babies are weighed and the girth of their arms is also measured, a color-coded proxy for malnutrition. There’s still the odd green, or normal. Children in the yellow zone are most common. In a few weeks many more will fall, like Amina, into the red. More tests followed to assess her condition before Amina was transferred to the emergency feeding center 10 miles away. It’s near capacity, and the medical supervisor expects they’ll begin pitching expansion tents much earlier this year.

DR. HASSAN AOUADE: In May, our admissions were up more than ten percent from 2011, and that usually means our June and July will be really bad. The peak is usually in August.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, the frequency, the very routineness of such crises could contain the damage in Niger this year, certainly compared to the last famine in 2010.

BISA WILLIAMS (U.S. Ambassador to Niger): This is not like the situation in 2010. I think we are better prepared, and I think it is because the government of President Issoufou really did alert the community very early. They sounded the alarm as far back as October, September of last year.

President Mahamadou IssoufouDE SAM LAZARO: Unlike earlier governments, which denied or downplayed famines, Williams says President Mahamadou Issoufou, elected to office early in 2011, has declared food security a top priority.

PRESIDENT MAHAMADOU ISSOUFOU: I remember the first big drought in 1973-74. Then again in 1984 we had another one. Since then, the time between droughts has been getting shorter, and I believe this is attributable to climate change.

DE SAM LAZARO: The president said he wants to take Niger beyond its chronic food emergencies.

PRESIDENT ISSOUFOU: That’s why we have created the 3N initiative—Nigeriens helping Nigeriens. It’s a structural response to the food crises that are consistently linked with our recurrent droughts. We are convinced that drought does not need to mean famine.

DE SAM LAZARO: A key part of the 3N program is to expand a greening initiative that began two decades ago. This former French colony is land-locked. The Sahara lies in the north, and it has steadily crept south, turning farmland—arid to begin with—into desert. International aid groups like World Vision have led the effort, sharing the president’s goal of going beyond humanitarian aid.

MICHEL DIATTA (World Vision): If you see the humanitarian response, it just come and respond to a need. But the long-term programming is something that really matters for World Vision. That is why FMNR is one of these initiatives that is mainstream in all of our programs.

DE SAM LAZARO: FMNR stands for Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration. It begins on barren patches like these, where World Vision and others have launched temporary employment projects.

ABDOULAYE SALEY: They give us food to dig these holes. We get four kilos of maize and six kilos of beans. This land is very dry, and they told us it will have trees. We can have better crops and fodder for our animals.

DE SAM LAZARO: The shallow, half-moon shaped depressions they’re digging trap rain water and tree seeds. It’s hard to imagine anything sprouting in such conditions. But in non-drought years there’s just enough rain to transform the land, and it’s already happened in a wide swath of southern Niger.

CHRIS REIJ: If you look around you, not a single tree that you see here has been planted. It’s all coming from seed stock in the soil, or coming from trees that were cut in the past, and the root system is still alive, and given chance to emerge, it will grow, or from seeds from the manure that livestock deposited here.

Chris ReijDE SAM LAZARO: The trees have kept desert sand storms at bay and returned land to productivity, says Chris Reij, a Dutch scientist who has worked in this region since the 1970s.

(speaking to Chris Reij): So this is a crop, it doesn’t look like much because it looks like it’s coming out of a desert.

REIJ: This is millet, which is one of the main crops here. And it has just been sown probably two weeks ago. But in three months time, it will be about one and a half to two meters high, and this whole field will be lush green.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the old days he says farmers used to clear their fields of trees or sapling. Under colonial laws, trees were state property, seen as a timber or forestry resources. Drought and rapid population growth added to the cutting, creating a virtual desert visible in this 1975 U.S. Geological Survey satellite picture.

World Vision Video: The leaves on the soil will protect the crop from drought. It will hold the moisture in the soil. Too easy!

DE SAM LAZARO: Chris Reij and a colleague, Tony Rinaudo, began championing agroforestry and a model for protecting trees on farmland that they saw practiced by a farmer in Burkina Faso, Niger’s western neighbor. Their work was picked up, among others, by World Vision, which produced this video. Farmers like Sakina Mati were employed to spread the word.

SAKINA MATI: We began using this technique in 2006, and it has worked well for us.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of the key goals was to dispel a commonly held notion that the payback is years away.

REIJ: Even in the first year you need to start pruning. The tree develops a trunk and starts developing a canopy, so even in the first year you already have some benefits—the leaves and some twigs that women can use as firewood in the kitchen. And by year two or three, certain trees will be taller than you and me.

DE SAM LAZARO: The leaves form livestock fodder and trap moisture in the soil. Improved soil fertility can mean better harvests, and already some villages have surpluses.

The surpluses have been gathered into a grain bank in Dansaga and about 20 other villages that are part of one aid group’s pilot project. Drought took a severe toll on the harvest last year, they say. But it hasn’t translated to famine.

WOMAN: The grain bank is helping us a lot. It is keeping our children fed until the harvest comes in.

REIJ: In a sea of difficulty, we find here examples where a surplus, a grain surplus, has been produced in the drought year 2011.

U.S. Ambassador Bisa WilliamsDE SAM LAZARO: Reij says Niger could some day become self-sufficient in food if villages like this are replicated on a large scale. But that “sea of difficulty” makes it daunting. Experts say it will require education and family planning. Literacy is just 30 percent, and the average woman bears seven children—a rate that will triple Niger’s population of 16 million by 2050, offsetting any gains in food production.

Then there are immediate, pressing needs of children like Amina. U.S. Ambassador Williams is optimistic Niger can make progress over the long term—also that a catastrophe can be avoided from this year’s famine. But she says it won’t be easy.

U.S. AMBASSADOR BISA WILLIAMS: There are at least 15 percent of children under two that are really, really hungry, so you are right, there is no magic bullet. It’s not—this is not something that has a quick fix to it. Development by its nature is a long-term process.

DE SAM LAZARO: For his part, President Issoufou says he’s acutely aware of Niger’s chronic neediness and of so-called donor fatigue.

PRESIDENT ISSOUFOU: I understand why donors would be tired of supporting our population. We ourselves are tired of needing the help, of not being able to feed our own people. For us in Niger, it’s a matter of shame not to be able to feed our children. That’s why we say: Please, don’t give us fish to eat. Teach us to fish for ourselves.

DE SAM LAZARO: Niger does have a head start. Remember the 1970s satellite picture? This one is from 2005. By Chris Reij’s count, Niger has grown 200 million trees over the past two decades—the only country in Africa to have actually added forest cover in the period.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Niamey, Niger.

A Rape Survivor Now Ministers Body and Soul

Photo: Travis Dove for The New York Times

Marcia Mount Shoop, as theologian in residence, leads a workshop at the White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N.C.

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: June 29, 2012

   
RALEIGH, N.C. — On the Sunday after she was attacked, Marcia Mount Shoop went to church. The descendant of three generations of ministers, she knew of few more familiar and reassuring places. The Presbyterian Church of Danville, Ky., was the congregation in her hometown, where just about everybody recognized her as the daughter of two college professors, a star miler on the high school track team.


Standing amid the faithful on that morning in 1984, just 15 years old, Ms. Shoop felt her thoughts returning to that night — the pressure of the boy’s body on top of her, her voice pleading with him to stop, the sight of her blood-drenched underwear after she ran home through the dark.

Church brought no relief. It made everything worse. Church, at least in the wake of tragedy, was the empty predictability of confession recited in unison, hymns sung by rote, sermons about the glorious soul and the sinful body and magical forgiveness. A favorite verse from Romans in her copy of the Good News Bible now sounded like a lie: “We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him.”

Only at home, alone with the secret of her rape, could Ms. Shoop find something to grasp for survival. “I felt Jesus so close,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It wasn’t the same Jesus I saw at church. It was this tiny, audible whisper that said, ‘I know what happened. I understand.’ And it kept me alive, that frayed little thread.”

By now, more than a quarter of a century later, that thread has led Ms. Shoop, 43, to become a Presbyterian minister herself, one who has developed religious teachings aimed at repairing the rift between mind and body, soul and spirit. Born out of a survivor’s struggle, they form her variation on the broader field of “incarnational theology,” which focuses on the living, breathing, physical Jesus.

Ms. Shoop’s ministry took her most recently to a monthlong stint at White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh as theologian in residence. In that role, she gave sermons, taught yoga, sang meditative songs, led prayers with Celtic and Native American origins and motivated dozens of members to “walk with God” in the church’s gymnasium. Every part of the program was intended to put the body back in the Body of Christ, and specifically to challenge the polite and restrained norms of Presbyterian practice.

“We always say, ‘We’re fine,’ ” she put it during an adult-education class in late June. “That’s where mainline Protestants have become most comfortable. We’re fine, and our role is to help other people be fine like us. How did we get ourselves into this fix of being only the helper, but never the one who needs being healed?”

In Ms. Shoop’s case, the reasons were both personal and theological. Her own sense of shame, and her attacker’s threat to kill her, kept her from telling anyone about the rape. She used distance-running as both a welcome catharsis and as a way to punish her body. And she threw herself into good works as an approved form of escape.

“Part of what my faith tradition gave me is trying to ignore what I went through by working for other people,” she said. “I was a service machine — Habitat for Humanity, the soup kitchen, outreach to the homeless. Being present for other people in their pain was a way to displace my pain.”

All the psychic scaffolding collapsed in 1996, when Ms. Shoop and her husband, John Shoop, went to see the film “Dead Man Walking,” about a nun who ministers to death row inmates. One scene showed a man’s body lying crushingly atop a woman’s. Within hours, Ms. Shoop had a nightmare about being raped. It recurred night after night after night.

At the urging of her husband and her sister, Ms. Shoop went to a rape-crisis center, beginning twice-weekly counseling. She also happened to be attending a multiracial Presbyterian church in Charlotte, where she was then living. One morning, two black women sang a spiritual titled “The Rough Side of the Mountain.”

“I realized that I’m coming up the rough side,” Ms. Shoop recalled. “I had to sit down. I couldn’t stand. I just started crying. I felt this new sensation — that church was a place where I could tell the truth.”

Soon after, Ms. Shoop entered the doctoral program in religion at Emory University in Atlanta. Her first class was about “the problem of evil,” and it was taught by Wendy Farley, a prominent figure in incarnational theology. From Professor Farley, Ms. Shoop began to learn about a Christianity that emphasized compassion for those who suffer rather than judgment on those who sin.

Ms. Shoop’s doctoral dissertation was eventually published as a book, “Let the Bones Dance,” a reference to the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones being reincarnated. As a pulpit minister, Ms. Shoop conflated the stories of rape survivors with the account in Matthew 15 of the Canaanite woman who will not let Jesus ignore her plea to heal her daughter.

“Forgiveness that is premature can be just another violation — it is a form of denial,” she declared in that sermon. “If it’s held out like a carrot for victims as that which makes them true Christians — if it’s the only litmus test we offer them for healing — then it is false forgiveness and it covers up the problem instead of transforming the situation.”

Her agenda for transformation, though it is grounded in the experience of and recovery from sexual violence, has grown broader over time.

Becoming the mother of two children allowed Ms. Shoop to see her body “as a place that was life-giving, not a place of death.” The lesson of recovering her physical self was one that she came to believe could be applied to mainline Protestant churches through petitionary prayer, more soulful music and a truly communal celebration of the Eucharist, among other forms of divinely inspired disruption.

“What happened to me wasn’t ‘for the good,’ ” she said, referring again to her favorite passage in Romans. “But God took the garbage, the stench, and gently, tenderly, indignantly wove it into this moment of redemption. What a gift.”

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu

Precious Moments

At the moment, we are part of the process of a friend and family members transitioning to the next step in the cycle of earth life back to universal spirit and it is a painful process yet full of laborious lessons for all involved.

Sometimes we think of the butterfly and moths during this time. They are not the only ones that shape shift on this planet.

Honoring process and trusting in universal spirit letting go of earthly will of control, holding hands with our dear friend and letting them go through this journey trusting that you are there. You are by their side.

This bond is a great gift, to let this process be, and be part of it together. Live and breath with your friend forever.

After all, we are all one.

Photos by Yoshimitsu Nagasaka

Gallery Weston Gallery

All is well with the mulit-universe, do you feel it?