Hello All,
I am reaching out at this year’s end because we have a problem in Burundi that I would like to ask you to help with. The problem is that the country is entering a period of famine that is affecting every Burundian. It’s a famine situation like we haven’t seen in the last twelve years. And the village where we have been working for 12 years, Gahararo, has not been spared. I hate to report it, but if we do not address the food scarcity situation in Gahararo, both children and adults in the village are going to start dying within the next several weeks. The situation is that dire.
As some of you may recall, we first started working in Burundi in 2012. It was that year that we implemented our porridge program to help the village children that were dying of starvation at the rate of three per month. Over the next twelve years, we virtually eradicated starvation in the village. However, in the second half of 2024, things have turned bad again. Food is so scarce that the village adults are showing up to take porridge, so instead of a couple hundred children having porridge, there are parents and even grandparents showing up to take porridge from the children’s bowls. No one in the village is getting enough calories to sustain life.
When I was in the village in September, I could see that the situation was getting dire and realized that all the initiatives we had planned for the village for 2025 (goat project, land project, school uniforms, etc.) would have to be put on the back burner until the food security issue improves. I have been working with Donatien and Onesphore to develop a plan to help address the situation. What we have come up with is a 3-month plan to provide each family in the village with enough food to sustain them for that period. The hope is that some of the root causes of this crisis will be resolved by then. If not, we will have to figure out what to do after that.
As to root causes, I can tell you what I have witnessed and what I have been told about how this famine situation came to be. First, Burundi is experiencing hyperinflation. At mid-year this year, the Burundi Franc was trading at 4,500 to the dollar. Right now, it is trading at 8,000 per dollar. That represents an almost 100 percent loss of the franc’s value in six months. Second, the government of Burundi is horribly mismanaging the food supply to the detriment of its own people. I was told that the government recently requisitioned several tonnes of rice from its own farmers and sent it to Zambia as a humanitarian gesture. Zambia is a considerably wealthier country than Burundi that is a net exporter of rice. Burundi did this to make the country look wealthier than it actually is and to curry favor with its fellow East African Community member nations. Meanwhile, their own people are dying of starvation! Third, sometime over the summer, the government issued a new currency and made the old currency defunct if not exchanged for new currency within a designated one-week period. I am told they did this because they wanted to sniff out rebels who might be hording cash to use in instigating a coup. The problem, however, is that the primitive Batwa people and other primitive people in Burundi – people who don’t have regular access to communications – had no way to know about this currency swap, and as a result, they lost all their savings, however much or meager, in the transaction. They were left literally destitute. Fourth, again in an effort to control potential rebel activity, the government has placed severe restrictions on the transport and sale of fuel. When I was there in May, the gas lines were anywhere from a week to two weeks long. It was better in September, although lines of two or three days were not unusual. Of course, the government and military can get fuel any time they need it with no wait.
The cost for the three-month food relief program is going to be between $20,000 and $30,000. I would like to raise that amount before the end of the year so that we can get started before the villagers start to die. Although Donatien is trying to raise as much as he can for all the Batwa villages in Harvest’s orbit, and then divide the money proportionally, I have explained that we would want any relief we provide to go directly to Gahararo since that is where we have invested so much of our time, money, and effort. So, whatever we raise will go to food relief for Gahararo.
We would so appreciate your helping us to prevent starvation in Gahararo. Thank you for standing with us in making a difference!
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