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What’s the best thing to feed to a malnourished child?
How about a ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), made from a mixture of milk powder, vegetable oil, vitamins, some sweetener and peanuts grown in Georgia?
When I worked for Doctors without Borders in Indonesia in 1999-2000, we used an RUTF called Plumpy Nut, packed into a shiny container that looks like a large packet of fast food ketchup. Snip the corner of the packet with a scissor, hand it to a child and they will suck that packet of enhanced peanut butter dry. It's tasty.
In our instance, the Plumpy Nut was used to feed malnourished kids being treated in a therapeutic feeding center.
My team was working with a population of people in Western Borneo who had been on the losing side of an ethnic conflict. About 40,000 Muslim Madurese residents who had lived in Kalimantan Barat for several generations had been driven from their homes (which were burned and disassembled) by the local Christian Chinese and animist indigenous populations. More than a thousand were murdered, often by being hacked to pieces or beheaded.
Terrorized families fled to the dense rainforests of Kalimantan Barat where they hid, sometimes for weeks. People developed malaria and infections, children became malnourished and vulnerable people of all ages died. Eventually, the Madurese made their way to makeshift camps in the provincial capital, Pontianak, where my Doctors without Borders companions and I worked to help them get back on their feet, along with our partners from World Vision, another non-governmental organization.
World Vision accessed this vital food aid for children courtesy of USAID. And my heart swelled with pride watching those kids suck on the packets of PlumpyNut that came out of boxes labeled, “USAID from the American people.”
The Indonesians noticed those words too. They were incredibly grateful for U.S. assistance and they told me so often. Being an American, I was a welcome presence in a faraway country. Gratitude flowed my way with an embarrassing regularity. Unlike my Dutch co-worker, who came from the country that had previously been Indonesia’s colonizer and who was treated with formal restraint, I was on the receiving end of a constant flow of ebullient thanks — people were so grateful to me for American largess. I was proud and humbled to receive their thanks on behalf of my country.
I’ve been contemplating the decimation of USAID a lot because I’ve actually been in the privileged position to see the good this aid — which, in total, comprised about a quarter of a percent of U.S. annual income — does worldwide. When I worked in Indonesia, when I worked for a short time with Cambodian refugees in a camp in Thailand in the 1980s, and when I worked in Micronesia before that, I was able to see how small amounts of U.S. help went a long way, and were so impactful. There are few things as deeply satisfying as watching a child who was so thin and malnourished that they lacked the energy to even cry, gain weight and start to smile, laugh and play.
Now this aid has been abruptly and capriciously terminated, leaving children to die without this nourishment, leaving patients without lifesaving malaria, TB or HIV drugs, or without life-preserving vaccines. I wonder what people think now.
Reading this week:
POLITICO: USDA cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks
New Yorker: Hundreds of Thousands Will Die
The Atlantic: His Daughter Was America’s First Measles Death in a Decade
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