Nº 25 – Desperation, hope, community

Wednesday, the 29th Abril 2020

by Leila Dregger

On hearing of the death of a fellow actor, Madonna called the virus the “great equaliser”. The opposite is, in fact, true: the coronavirus crisis is exacerbating inequalities. International observers estimate that, in the global South, more people will die from hunger and the government’s violent enforcement of its measures than from Covid-19 itself. But hopeful news is now reaching us from some quarters: people living in slums and poor neighbourhoods are helping one another. This is now the time of sustainability and community wisdom.

There have always been rays of hope in those poor areas where people had taken their fate into their own hands even before the pandemic. An example from Kenya: nine years ago, I visited Mitume, a slum in Kitale. There, a young man named Philip Munyasia had created a tiny garden amid the huts and the rubbish, where he taught children, young people and women all about permaculture practices. They collected seeds and sowed them in abundance, and they also built a well: in the midst of despair, a place of hope was born. In the meantime, the project has grown to become a school of sustainability, with a home for street children and two large gardens, while a conference centre is currently under construction. I tried to find out how his initiative is doing at the moment. Munyasia: “Nobody here has any savings. Staying at home would mean death.” As in many parts of Africa, people here are confronted with a greater threat than the effects of the virus: hunger.

Above all, Philip has intensified his efforts to achieve food autonomy. Hundreds are now joining in his venture, because their normal jobs have been lost. Alongside the activities being developed by young people, street children and women, more and more community gardens and rainwater ponds are being created, together with reforestation work. They are building solar cookers and biogas plants, and making face masks from old T-shirts. Since Philip had already drilled several wells some years ago, he can now grant free access to drinking water to all of the slum’s inhabitants. Without this, hardly anyone would be able to comply with the hygiene regulations! “To prevent our new rainwater ponds from creating a plague of mosquitoes and thus increasing the risk of malaria, we use fish. These feed on the mosquitoes and we will then eat them at the end of the year,” he says happily. Philip is in constant contact with other initiatives via the internet and by telephone, and he advises people in Uganda, Namibia and Tanzania to use this time in a similar way. “Now is not the time for despair, but the time to take up our spades.”

Another example of self-help in poor areas comes from Brazil. Many favelas are closed off and the jobs in the rich areas are disappearing. So, what do they live on at this time? In the favela of Jardim Nakamura, in São Paulo, Claudio Miranda and his family have been working towards self-sufficiency and sustainability for 20 years, creating a vegetarian kitchen and a music school for street children. Faced with the threat of hunger, they have now launched a pilot scheme: the “favela card” for basic provisions. Basic food is distributed through a kind of voucher system operated at local shops. 500 desperately poor families will soon receive their basic requirements in terms of food and hygiene products without having to go through the crowds. Miranda and his team stock the shops and have organised a hygienic delivery service financed through a worldwide crowdfunding campaign. In doing so, they have also boosted local trade.

I’m sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such rays of hope: people who are overcoming the crisis together, pooling their knowledge of sustainability. This is more than just a simple survival strategy. Together, they are laying the foundations for a possible new era, a post-coronavirus era. Perhaps one day we will not want to return to so-called normality at all, preferring instead to rely on what nature and people can create together.