For a Bowl of Soup

Images of a sea of youth providing ready-made mammoth audiences for political party rallies during last year’s General Elections are glued in my aging memory. For the most part, these young people are the offspring of the under-privileged. So, a bowl of soup, the chance to get anything – just anything at all – for free is at once exhilarating and intoxicating, and can bring smiles where there was only tension on a glorious sunny sweaty Easter Sunday.

The life of a migrant can be tragic. The crowd at Joy 99.7FM’s 2009 Easter Soup Kitchen was predominantly female migrants from the three Northern regions. If I was a young girl growing up in a rural area, I would just about now be having a strong urge to move from the vast but narrow parameters of underdeveloped Ghana. My destination of choice would have been Accra, the city of contradictions, where choked gutters and heaps of refuse can grow in privileged East Legon.

An unsolved mystery at the event was the absence of the poor and needy from southern Ghana origins. To the best of my knowledge, poor and hungry folks from Ga, Ada, Krobo, Ewe, Akuapem, Ashanti, Brong, Twifo, Denkyira and Fante ethnic groups live in Accra. Why didn’t they attend the Easter Soup Kitchen? Are they not desperately poor too?

The Easter Soup Kitchen bore testimony to the urgency to develop the three northern regions and rural Ghana. Fortunately, Team Mills and his NDC administration’s manifesto promises to embark on a grand accelerated Savannah area development project. It will include the development of a Master Plan aimed at harnessing the potential of the vast underdeveloped Savannah belt of Ghana that stretches from the three northern regions down to the northern parts of the Brong Ahafo and Volta regions. Of course the potential includes the human capital as well as the varied natural resources.

This promise is exciting. It is a promise that soothes the aching heart. So now, we just must keep all fingers and toes crossed for change to happen. But specifically, we must hold the Government accountable. Promises must be fulfilled. The international son of our land, Kofi Annan, said this about Africans: “We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems if only we can find the political will.”

So long as the Savannah belt and the rural areas remain in a sorry state of underdevelopment, the youth will continue to troop down to the bright city lights in search of non-existent greener pastures. These are our own modern day explorers. The will is strong to relocate to the cities where they won’t have much of substance to do so will end up sitting by the roadsides – idle, watching, waiting. They will sleep in conditions not meant for humans and our slums will grow.

And when drugs beckon them, some will try it and get hooked either as sellers or users. Crime will beckon them too! And some will scale walls and knock down burglar-proof doors and windows to make grand dawn-time visits to the privileged in the comfort of their homes – at gun point. It will be nothing but an exercise in sharing. Wrong, but difficult to stop. But, I digress.

The Easter Soup Kitchen was not just thought-provoking. It was fun. Participants were treated to lots of free stuff. Vitamins, anti-malarial medication, toothpaste, de-wormer, contraceptive pills, condoms, powdered milk, yoghurt, an assortment of food and of course water were distributed.

There were several scenes of greed meeting freebies, eyeball-to-eyeball. The urge to pack more than was due was apparent, probably to save for tomorrow and the next. For many of the participants, it was a day of looting anything and everything. It would be interesting to find out what proportion of the loot was sold for cash.

There were many hilarious scenes. Infants in the two-year age bracket who have just gained walking skills could not sit still at the live band music. They lost it on the floor, letting go of their unique dance moves with no inhibitions whatsoever. By mid-day, several faces at the event had a powdery appearance from sucking Nunu Instant Filled Milk Powder.

A fragile aging man who appeared to be recovering from stroke went in line to collect a pack of condoms from the Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment (WISE) stand. Of what use would that be to him? Well, that was his pot of soup!

As the day rolled by, humanity began to degenerate, regressing toward the ugly mean. People who had been calm in the morning increasingly lost their dignity. Some broke into running toward anything others run toward and in the process fell, rose and run again, sweaty and losing it at the mind.

Women are wonderfully creative when it comes to packing stuff into non-existent pockets. The under-belly bosom regions and back-sides are all convertible sites for packing whatever floats a woman’s boat. So it was that bowls of food, second-hand clothing, fruits, drinks and anything-for-free made it as body backs. One woman succeeded in making a back-pack look just like a perfect baby.

The participants who were on a quest for free ‘soup’ were mostly women, girls and infants. The number of young women (some pregnant) who were no more than girls themselves with their own babies tugged at the back was worrying. These are the babies who will grow up on the streets to perpetuate a vicious cycle of streetism.

An interesting global phenomenon is that literate and privileged people have imbibed the message of family planning and as a result, have fewer children while the non-literate, underdeveloped/developing poor cast family planning to the dogs and pop out babies with reckless abandon. The outcome is that the population of developed countries and the elites of the world continue to drop. So therefore, someday, underdevelopment will take over the world as the developed become endangered species.

Here is one way to explain the phenomenon. When you can’t self-actualize from the neck-up, at the brain, then you’re left with the option of concentrating on self-actualizing at what appears to be the only viable site of choice – the groin. The outcome is the over-population of the earth because children become the tangible signs of success. After all, they are the products of the groin and therefore of joy, regardless of quality.

But in spite of the motivation for populating the earth even when one cannot afford it, it is important for Ghana to return to a family planning campaign. Fact: our population has doubled in two decades, from 12 million in the late 1980s to the current estimated 23.2 million. The meek shall not inherit the earth!

Easter Soup Kitchen goes beyond bringing together more than 1,000 hungry mouths for a good Easter free feeding and medical care. It promotes volunteerism and philanthropy. The sheer number of volunteers who spent the day helping out was heart-warming.

But here are a few enduring questions: What is the long-lasting impact of an event of the magnitude of the mega Easter party? One eats ‘soup’ today just to go dry tomorrow? Are deep-seated needs of participants being met? But then it’s beyond ‘soup.’ The health checks and counselling are priceless for the participants who take the time to go through them instead of rushing for free food.