For the first time in months, a trickle of aid has arrived in northern Gaza. 13 trucks drove from the Rafah border crossing in the south to deliver desperately needed flour, a day after the first sea delivery was unloaded.
Published On 17 Mar 2024
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam – The white-walled room in a house on the outskirts of Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam’s coffee capital, is quiet. The only thing breaking the silence is the occasional beep of an electronic scale, or the sound of coffee being poured into a measuring glass. A handful of people, all wearing white lab coats, concentrate on their work.
“This is really a lab,” says Nguyen Van Hoa, as he walks around the room in the white lab coat he wears over his jeans and trainers. A young man, Hoa calls himself a “green bean hunter” and is the owner of Stone Village Lab and Education, a company that researches and sources high-quality coffee beans for cafes and coffee businesses.
Now and then, he stops at a desk to demonstrate how many beans to add to each cup and the ideal water temperature. Baristas and cafe owners come here from all over the country to learn about coffee, from the capital Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City in the south.
He holds out a cup with a small serving of dark brown coffee brewed from a blend he has been working on for seven years. “It will change the mind of anyone who thinks that you cannot make good coffee from Robusta,” he says.
This – changing the minds of the many Robusta sceptics – is what has occupied Nguyen Van Hoa for the past few years. In the coffee industry, Robusta is known as the inferior sibling of Arabica, lacking the latter’s complexity and sweeter, smoother notes. Robusta is almost always mass-produced and cheap.
“The Robusta market is only looking for the best price. But we can change that,” Nguyen Van Hoa says.
They must. The Arabica coffee bean which is near-universally synonymous with quality coffee, is under serious threat from climate change. Reforming the image and quality of the much-maligned – but, as its name suggests, resilient – Robusta coffee bean is crucial for the future of coffee.
And Vietnam is where that change may well happen. It is the world’s largest producer of Robusta – and second to Brazil in overall coffee production, and the bean comprises 95-97 percent of all the coffee grown in the country.
This has been the case since French colonists brought coffee plants to the region in the 1850s.
“The idea was to ‘just bring the beans and the more you bring the more [money] you make’,” explains Timen Swijtink, managing partner at the coffee company Lacaph in Ho Chi Minh City.
In the decades that followed, coffee plantations grew in popularity. After Vietnam’s first commercial coffee processing plant was built in 1950, the industry continued to expand.
Then, in 1986, Vietnam introduced Doi Moi (“reinvention”), which shifted the country’s post-war economic focus to be more market oriented. Since then, the country’s annual coffee bean production has exploded, up from 18,400 tonnes to more than 1.9 million tonnes.
Today, 90 percent of Vietnam’s coffee is grown around Buon Ma Thuot, on the Central Highlands plateau, between 500 metres (1,640 feet) and 800 metres (2,625 feet) above sea level. Here, in every direction, vast fields of bright green coffee plants stretch into the horizon. In the autumn, the small cherries, which are about the size of grapes and grow in bunches, weigh down the branches and change from green to red – a sign that they are ready for harvest.
Just south of Buon Ma Thuot, not far from Nguyen Van Hoa’s coffee lab, is the Aeroco coffee plantation – eight hectares in size (20 acres) – which Anh Nguyen Tu and her husband, Le Dinh Tu, have run since 2017.
Quality is not top of the list for the big, multinational companies that turn the majority of Vietnam’s coffee beans into instant coffee for the soft drink and pharmaceutical companies that use caffeine in their products. Both buy beans cheaply and in bulk.
But at Aeroco, the focus is very much on growing “fine” Robusta. Le Dinh Tu is an agricultural engineer. Before shifting to specialty coffee, the couple provided organic fertilisers to farmers for 18 years.
“It took three years until we could survive from coffee, there are many costs involved when you want to work in a sustainable way,” says Anh Nguyen Tu.
Wearing a straw hat as protection from the afternoon sun, she walks out among the plants. She explains the growing process. “We grow in three layers. First grass, then coffee, then trees like jackfruit and pepper. This is to balance the ecosystem. The plants are happy together,” she says.
Planting this way benefits both the bushes and the land. It gives the coffee plant much-needed shade, and helps the soil retain its nutrients.
Anh Nguyen Tu picks and carefully scratches a pale red cherry with her nail to determine if it is fully ripe. If the beans are harvested too early, the coffee will not have the round and sweet aftertaste typical for quality coffee. “These cherries need a bit more time,” she says, then walks towards an open space where a group of employees are gathering beans which had been laid out on canvases in the sun.
It’s a time-consuming process. To properly dry and ferment the beans, they must be turned every 30 minutes, and then brought indoors in the afternoon. “I had no idea how patient you must be when growing coffee,” says Pham Thi Duyen, one of the workers. She wears a green shirt, just like the others in the team, most of whom are women.
“I realise it now, when doing it with my own hands,” she says.
Most coffee grown at Aeroco is Robusta. The couple also runs a smaller Arabica plantation in Kon Tum, a couple of hours away, at a slightly higher altitude. Arabica plants need more elevation than Robusta bushes to grow well: at least about 800 metres (2,625 feet) above sea level, but preferably higher, up to 1,500 metres (5,000 feet). At such altitudes, the air is cooler, and the beans grow more slowly, which allows time to develop more flavour.
Typically, Robusta beans are mass-produced. Harvesting happens just once, which means many unripe and damaged cherries end up in the mix, and the beans are then left to dry on the ground. At Aeroco, beans are hand-picked multiple times to ensure that only the ripe cherries are picked each time.
The process may lower productivity, “but the quality is incomparable”, Anh Nguyen Tu says.
At Cheo Leo, an iconic family-run cafe on a small backstreet in Ho Chi Minh City, a waiter brings out glass after glass with a few centimetres of dark, glimmering coffee.
“We roast it dark and serve it strong,” he says.
Vietnam has a unique way of brewing coffee called “phin”. First, a perforated metal filter plate is placed on top of a glass or mug. A few tablespoons of finely ground beans are added to the reusable metal brew chamber, which sits on the filter plate. A gravity chamber is pressed down on top of the coffee, before hot water is poured over top. This process allows the coffee to slowly drip downward into the glass, enhancing its flavour.
The dark, aromatic drink can be served either hot (“ca phe nong”) or with ice (“ca phe da”), and often with sweetened, condensed milk.
Phin coffee is without exception made from Robusta. And because the beans are generally low quality, they’re often roasted with other ingredients – such as butter, soy sauce, sugar or vanilla – to add flavour.
“This started 50-60 years ago, when the country was poor, and no one could afford quality beans. Now, people have gotten used to the taste and still prefer it,” explains Julien Nguyen, the young owner of the cafe Tonkin Cottage in Ho Chi Minh City.
Until recently, this was the story of Vietnam’s Robusta. But things are changing.
With some growers now treating the cultivation of Robusta as they would Arabica, the bar is being raised. Countries such as Uganda, India and Indonesia now produce specialty Robusta, with several varieties scoring more than 80 points out of 100 on the Specialty Coffee Association’s chart, the industry’s benchmark. Scoring 80 points or higher on this index classifies a coffee as “specialty” and gives it a rating of “very good”. Higher than 85 is “excellent” while scoring 90 or more is “outstanding”.
Climate change has been a big factor. Robusta tolerates higher temperatures – typically 22 – 30 degrees Celcius (72 – 86 degrees Fahrenheit) – than Arabica – typically 15C – 20C (59 – 68F) – and is more resistant to disease, insects and funguses. Studies have shown that by 2050 as much as 50 percent of the land used to grow Arabica today might be unsuitable for production.
The global coffee industry will have to transform itself – that means growing Robusta in new locations and producing a higher-quality product.
“The industry understands this. But it is also in shock,” says Juan Pablo Solis, senior adviser on climate change and environment at Fairtrade International, which helps farmers and workers achieve better working conditions and fair value for their products. “Everyone is trying to prepare themselves for these challenges.”
Coffee’s global landscape may change. “Coffee is a fragile plant that requires a certain micro-climate to thrive. In the future, it will disappear from some countries,” explains Solis.
“People will still demand coffee and some countries will continue producing lower quality coffee in massive volumes,” Solis says. However, he adds, there will also be smaller plantations focused on producing high-quality coffee.
Research by Global Change Biology, the environmental change journal, shows that production of Arabica is expected to decline by 50 percent by 2088 because of rising global temperatures.
The world is already seeing signs of this. Severe drought in Brazil in 2021, for example, cut the annual crop that year by one-third.
Robusta will be more resilient to the effects of climate change – although experts caution that more research is needed to understand its limitations.
Some cafe owners in Vietnam say there is already a growing demand for higher-end coffee from younger drinkers. “Specialty coffee is a youth culture here,” says Luong Hanh, the manager of Soul Coffee in Buon Ma Thuot. Wearing an oversized white shirt, she sits at the long bar at the centre of the airy cafe, which has drinks like lychee- or guava-flavoured cold brew on the menu.
Besides drinks brewed with Arabica, it also serves coffee made with local Robusta beans.
“We want to see more fine Robusta in Vietnam. In the past, it was bitter and not very good. Now, we can find beans that were picked when ripe and kept in the right temperature and humidity,” she says.
“People who like specialty coffee usually say that Robusta is bitter and has a too-heavy body. But they are changing their minds after coffee shops started serving good Robusta,” she says.
It’s also about the coffee experience. At SHIN Heritage in Ho Chi Minh City, iced coffee is served in oversized wine glasses to a business crowd. At 43 Factory Coffee Roaster, in the same city, a massive art installation at the entrance simulates a bird’s view of coffee plantations. And Lacaph, another cafe in Ho Chi Minh City, holds workshops for java enthusiasts on the history of Vietnamese coffee.
In the past five years, coffee consumption in Asia has increased by 1.5 percent – three times more than in Europe.
This has benefitted local players in Vietnam. Instead of Starbucks or Costa Coffee, local giants Phuc Long or Highlands Coffee occupy prime locations. Starbucks has only one outlet per one million people in Vietnam, in contrast to neighbouring Thailand or Malaysia, where the chain has between six and 11 outlets per one million people.
Vietnamese coffee is growing abroad, too. Cong Caphe, a popular chain styled with Vietcong memorabilia, has outlets in Seoul, Kuala Lumpur and, as of last year, Toronto.
Back in Buon Ma Thuot, Nguyen Van Hoa takes out a book from one of her shelves – the World Atlas of Coffee, which has a chapter on Vietnam. “This book changed my mind. It says that Vietnamese coffee is bad, which made me want to change the image of our coffee,” he says. “I want to show that it is possible to make great phin. It is our tradition,” he says.
But no rush. Change is a slow process, he says. Just like brewing phin coffee.
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
ِAl-Yaman Camp, Idlib, northwest Syria – Looking to make something tasty and thrifty, Bayan al-Jassem, 32, decided to reach for a staple of the Syrian kitchen, maqali (said with a glottal stop).
The decision was reached a few hours before sundown on the second day of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims across the world, and a decision was needed so food could be readied for iftar, the sunset breaking of the fast. Because maqali is a simple dish, true to its name which means “fried things”, Bayan was not too worried about whipping it up in time.
“We all love fried vegetables,” Bayan said, referring to her husband and five children, adding that the vegetables in question that day would be zucchini, eggplant, cauliflower and potatoes, a classic combination.
Her husband, Khaled al-Reem, 45, was dispatched to the market to pick out the required ingredients and bring them home.
Then the couple started working together to prep, with Bayan heading out to the communal water tank to wash the vegetables and then sitting on the floor in the tent with Khaled to peel and chop the vegetables into the sizes they wanted for frying.
Maqali is a simple dish to prepare, as the recipe’s steps are limited to chopping or slicing the vegetables into the preferred size and then deep frying them to the preferred brown, so Bayan had little to worry about in that regard.
She and Khaled had to make sure that they prepared more potatoes than the other vegetables though, as their eldest son, Hisham, is especially partial to fried potatoes.
What was going to pose a problem though was heating the oil in her battered, blackened cooking pot perched above a delicate fire stoked painstakingly with twigs as sunset approached.
But she managed, and set to frying, with Khaled standing by to help and to ferry plates of finished food back to the tent from the spot where they had set up their makeshift open cooking space.
Maqali are usually sprinkled with a mix of spices as they emerge hot from the frying oil, things like cumin and hot red pepper flakes may feature in that mix.
They are also served with a range of different sauces, depending on the family’s preference – some favour a tart, rich tahini sauce and others lean towards a pungent garlic sauce with lemon.
But Bayan and her family are so impoverished by the war and their displacement that they do not have the money for sauces – they, like thousands of other internally displaced people (IDPs), had come to the Yaman displacement camp five years ago when they had to flee their home in Khan Sheikhoun.
So she chooses to sprinkle the vegetables with salt alone and serve them with a simple chopped salad.
By the end of the 13th year of war in Syria, the World Food Programme estimates that 12.9 million Syrians are suffering from food shortages – more than half of the estimated population of 23.4 million.
And with the continuous rise in food prices, which has more than doubled in the past year, families with the lowest incomes are only able to secure one-fifth of their needs.
To try to make ends meet and secure what they need, Bayan works with her husband and those of their children big enough to work – the eldest is 10 years old and the youngest two – collecting scrap and metal cans to sell.
During Ramadan, practising Muslims do not eat, drink, smoke or have sexual relations from sunrise until sunset.
The sunset meal to break the fast takes on a festive air, with many people having gatherings with friends and families or community members, and for that, festive tables are prepared to break the fast.
“We used to cook kibbeh and mahshi,” Bayan said sadly, recalling the famous, meat-rich recipes (kibbeh is a combination of fatty spiced ground lamb and a casing made of bulghur and ground meat, while mahshi is stuffed vine leaves cooked over lamb ribs for a rich flavour) that used to adorn the family’s table before the war.
Today, even frying vegetables is a luxury for Syria’s poor families, now 90 percent of Syrians.
“If we can’t buy oil, we can’t fry,” Bayan said. “We’ll usually just eat boiled potatoes.”
It costs a minimum of 250 Turkish lire (about $8) to make maqali, Bayan estimates, while her family’s combined income is 60 to 70 lire ($1.87 to $2.18) a day, so they either have to go into debt to get enough food or adapt by enduring hunger and limiting themselves to one meal a day.
But during Ramadan, Bayan tries everything to give her children whatever special requests they have for the iftar.
“When they ask me for a specific dish, I do what I can to secure it by asking neighbours or others for help,” she said, adding that sometimes she manages it but at other times she has to try to distract them from their cravings instead.
A year ago, the family was receiving about $50 a month in relief support, but the decline in humanitarian funding, which hit 37.8 percent of requirements for the 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), meant even that small amount had to be stopped.
Regardless of the difficulties they face, along with 16.7 million other Syrians who need aid in 2024 according to UN estimates, they still try to find that special joy that Ramadan brings.
Bayan still remembers simpler times before the war during which her extended family gathered around a table filled with delicious food. “Family gatherings are the best thing about Ramadan,” she said.
Now, the family waits for the call to Maghrib prayers, which signal that they should break their fast.
Bayan, her husband and their children sit on the floor to eat their simple yet delicious meal together, passing around the plates of fried vegetables and salad, wrapping morsels up in the bread they were able to buy that day. It is not much, but at least they are together and they have food to eat, and that brings a smile to their faces.
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
New Delhi, India – Bidotama, 26, is in the kitchen stirring peanuts in a pan. Every few minutes, she turns to her best friend, Mardza, 25, who is busy chopping tomatoes and slicing U-morok, a hot chilli variety, that will go into the special chicken curry bubbling on a two-burner gas stove.
They speak in their native Meitei language and chuckle as they continue cooking.
In the living room, Akoijam Sunita, 45, is moving a mixture of black perilla seeds, ginger and salt between a heavy pestle mortar and an electric grinder, hoping to get a grainy texture and not a paste. The graininess is key to getting thoiding asuba, a Manipuri side-dish, right.
Bidotama, or Bido as she likes to be called, and Mardza dressed in those comfy, furry pants the young like to live in these days, have been up since 4:30am cooking for a Sunday lunch service that they run out of Akoijam’s three-bedroom apartment in New Delhi.
Until May last year, both Bido and Mardza worked as digital marketing managers in Imphal, the capital of Manipur in India’s northeast. Akoijam, or Akoi as she is referred to, was their Delhi-based team leader.
Now Bido and Mardza are Akoi’s house guests and she is their business partner in the lunch service they have started in an attempt to rebuild their lives after they were wrenched from their homes in Manipur in the wake of ethnic violence that broke out in May. It has left over 200 people dead and thousands injured, and turned the beautiful, scenic state with the world’s only floating national park, into a ravaged war zone.
A day after violence erupted, Manipur was placed under curfew and an internet ban was imposed that lasted till December. In those seven months, many businesses shut down, including Bido and Mardza’s.
In the clashes between the dominant, largely Hindu Meitei community and the minority Christian Kuki-Zo community, many have lost their homes and continue to live in relief camps in Manipur or, like Bido and Mardza, fled the state fearing for their lives and in search of a livelihood.
In the New Delhi apartment, all three women find solace in cooking, eating, talking about their food and running the Lomba Kitchen.
“This meal from Lomba Kitchen is Yum Gi mathel,” types Akoi on her phone as she composes a brief note about the Manipuri dishes. She will WhatsApp it to customers as the food parcels are sent out for delivery later in the day.
Their enterprise is named after a purple-coloured herb that looks like lavender and has a citrusy aroma and a peppery taste – the Lomba. It flowers around October-November and is used as a garnish in several Manipuri dishes.
“The name Lomba has meaning … When we think of winter, we think of Lomba. It reminds us of home,” says Bido.
Akoi crushes some Lomba flowers and sprinkles them on eromba, a mash made with yendem (colocasia) stalks, beans, sponge gourd, potatoes and fermented grilled fish. In the text she is sending to customers, she calls it “an object of our unconditional love”.
It’s 7am, and New Delhi’s temperature has dropped to a freezing single digit. But Akoi’s apartment, where the Sunday lunch menu is slowly coming together, is warm with the aroma of Manipur.
![Akoijam Sunita, 45, at a pop-up dinner she hosted in Bengaluru recently [Photo courtesy Lomba Kitchen]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Akoi-1709309390.jpeg?w=770&resize=770%2C513)
Roughly 1,500 miles from New Delhi, Manipur is one of the seven ‘sister states’ in the northeast that is geographically connected by a narrow 200km (120-mile) strip of land called the Chicken’s Neck to India’s mainland.
Most people from the northeast have distinct physical features and culinary traditions that add to India’s much-vaunted diversity. But incidents of racial discrimination, even verbal and physical abuse for their food choices, are routine in cities they migrate to, like New Delhi and Mumbai.
Staples like fermented bamboo shoots, soya bean paste and dried fish are added to northeastern dishes for their meaty, savoury aroma and umami flavour – one of the five core tastes that include sweet, sour, bitter and salty.
In her 2022 paper on “Dirty Food, racism and casteism in India”, anthropologist Dolly Kikon gives the instance of landlords and neighbours finding the food cooked by people from the northeast “stinky and revolting”, a reaction that, she says, stems from “ignorance of the eclectic food cultures in northeast India”.
The 2019 Bollywood film Axone, about a group of friends cooking the northeastern delicacy akhuni (or axone) with pork and strong-smelling, fermented soya beans, captures the hate that northeastern food often faces in the rest of India.
“My food has been so racially attacked that I always wanted to do something around food … When they [Bido and Mardza] came to stay here, we started talking about cooking … Maybe invite people over for a Manipuri meal,” Akoi says and then laughs as she adds, “But we didn’t have a dining table.”
”I’m here and she’s over there. We have a river in the middle,” says Bido, gesturing to explain where she and Mardza live – across the Nambul river that runs through Imphal, a city where the sun comes up early and the streets get crowded by 6am.
On alternate days, Bido and Mardza would set off around 4am to buy vegetables from the Ima Keithel or Mothers’ Market, the largest all-women market in the world. And then they would cook for both their families before heading to work.
May 3, 2023, was no different.
After finishing work, Mardza filled petrol in her car, dropped Bido and went home.
It was around 8pm when Bido heard someone banging an electric pole with a stone – a common way to alert the neighbourhood and get people to gather for any information or disturbing news.
Bido came out and heard from the people who had gathered that there had been clashes between members of the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities in Churachandpur, a hill district 200km (120 miles) from Imphal. Houses were being burned and there had been incidents of firing.
“It started raining,” says Bido, and under the soft solar street lights, she saw a religious procession coming her way. “I could see women on horseback, people dancing and singing because Lainingthou Sanamahi, considered the king of all gods, was returning to the local shrine,” Bido says.
The chatter in her community about the violence was getting louder and suddenly, she recalls, “The procession stopped … The clarinets, the drums fell quiet … It was eerie.”
The Meiteis, who are politically strong, live in and around the Imphal valley, occupying about 10 percent of the state’s land.
Kukis live predominantly in the hills and are listed as Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional protection given to historically disadvantaged tribes. It comes with certain guarantees, including job reservations and land rights.
For years, Meiteis have been demanding their inclusion in the Scheduled Tribes list, which would entitle them to jobs and government loans, and also give them the right to buy tribal land in the hill districts.
Their demand has been rejected in the past, but on March 27, 2023, a court directed the Manipur government to consider including Meiteis in the Scheduled Tribe list, triggering protests and clashes.
“Our neighbourhood was not affected by violence,” says Bido, but adds that there was constant fear of being attacked, often fuelled by rumours.
May 5, 2023, was one such night when a rumour swirled about three armed Kuki men hiding in the river. “Everyone was so delusional, so paranoid,” Bido recalls.
At 1am, several men from her locality jumped into the river and began searching for the armed men. On Mardza’s side, people were out with big flashlights scanning the water for signs of humans.
Bido could not sleep at night. Lying awake, the slightest sound would make her panic.
In anticipation of a sudden attack, she kept her sneakers close and packed a small school bag. It had her educational certificates, a couple of candles, a matchbox, a T-shirt, a water bottle, some paracetamol, cyclopam tablets for menstrual pain and three Choco Pies.
When Bido and Mardza eventually left Manipur at the end of May, they carried a small suitcase and a red handbag: They had packed some summer clothes, ngari (fermented) fish, fermented bamboo shoots and dry chillies. The plan was to get away for a few days, get some sleep, get some work and, when the violence subsided, to return home.
It’s 9:30am in Akoi’s apartment, the electric rice cooker’s lid is bobbing with steam and her large coffee table is starting to fill up.
There’s a pressure cooker filled with hawai thongba (split lentils cooked with chives, smoked green chillies and garnished with dill), Mardza’s chicken curry (yen thongba) and kambong kanghou – a stir-fry dish made with brinjal, crispy peanuts and water bamboo that a store in New Delhi sources from around Manipur’s Loktak lake.
“In Manipur, meals end with something sour. Usually, it’s a fruit sprinkled with dry-roasted chickpea flour and red chilli powder,” says Akoi.
But since that is not practical, the Lomba Kitchen sends a little surprise gift with its meals. Last week it was black rice kheer, this week it is thoiding asuba – a traditional Manipuri condiment that Akoi has ground to perfection and is now rolling into Oreo-sized little patties in her gloved hands.
In June last year, just weeks after Bido and Mardza had flown into New Delhi, when they were missing home and wanted to go back, a video of two women from the Kuki-Zo community being paraded naked and sexually abused by a mob surfaced.
It sparked national outrage and fear.
“This had never happened in our generation in Manipur. There were a lot of bandhs, blockades, but nothing like this. Our generation was very happy. We thought it [the violence] would be contained by the next day … or in a few days. It’s now been … what?” Bido asks Mardza.
“Nine months,” she replies.
Their parents are still in Imphal and refused to leave with their daughters. Bido and Mardza talk to them on video calls regularly. Firing and deaths, they say, are now a part of everyday conversation.
“Earlier we would get triggered by the news of death … Now, when we hear some person died, we’re like, ‘Oh, where?’… I think that part of us died … the emotion part,” says Bido.
After several stressful weeks of trial and error, the Lomba Kitchen team has cracked the toughest part of their enterprise – packing food and making sure that the meals are delivered on time.
Several rows of black plastic meal trays are laid out neatly on the coffee table.
Beginning from the top right, Bido starts putting in the stir-fry, then the dal. Mardza adds the chicken, Bido puts in eromba, carefully wiping the edges, ensuring there are no spills anywhere. Finally, on top of the rice, she places two long slices of daskus champhut (chayote squash, lightly boiled).
Together, and with Akoi’s help, Bido and Mardza have found a rhythm of life in Delhi.
In a room full of cardboard boxes with stuff left behind by friends that Akoi and her husband have taken in over the years, Bido and Mardza have negotiated a small world of their own. A laptop sits on a small study table and their clothes are neatly folded and kept on the bags they arrived with.
They have found new clients and resumed their digital marketing work. On weekends, they run Lomba Kitchen.
Mardza and Bido talk wistfully about weekends spent driving out of Imphal valley with their mats, food and friends. They would settle on a hill from where they had a panoramic view of the city and the Loktak lake.
Bido says she often dreams of her home, of Manipur, of the tree-lined university campus with “overgrown grass” where she completed her graduation.
But in her nightmares, triggered by news of violence from Manipur, she sees people running after her or watches herself being killed.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I lose my s***… When I am closer to nature I have better control of myself.”
Bido, a literature student, is expressive and often, mid-sentence, breaks into Meitei language to ask Mardza a question, to confirm a fact, or to hand her something.
Mardza, who has a master’s in microbiology, is the quieter of the two. She finishes Bido’s sentences and fills in the gaps with details and dates.
So what’s your favourite dish, I ask Mardza, trying to get her to talk.
She falls silent for so long that Bido gets impatient and blurts out while shaking with laughter: “What’s the dish you would eat if you were to die today?”
“Eromba,” Mardza finally says.
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
At least 46 people have died after a massive fire spread through a multi-storey building housing restaurants in Dhaka. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Published On 1 Mar 2024
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
Drought crisis brought on by El Nino and climate change will affect more than a million households, President Hakainde Hichilema says.
Zambia has declared the drought the country is currently going through a national disaster, with President Hakainde Hichilema saying the lack of rain has devastated the agricultural sector, affecting more than one million families.
The southern African country has gone without rain for five weeks at a time when farmers need it the most, Hichilema said in a televised national address from the capital, Lusaka, on Thursday.
This compounded the effects of another dry spell and flooding that hit the nation last year, he added.
“The destruction caused by the prolonged drought spell is immense,” he said. The dry spell has already affected 84 of the country’s 116 districts.
Exacerbated by climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon, the crisis threatens national food security, as well as water and energy supply, Hichilema said. Zambia is highly reliant on hydroelectric power.
“In view of these challenges … we hereby declare a prolonged drought as a national disaster,” the president said.
The measure allows for more resources to address the crisis, with the drought expected to last well into March.
With heavy hearts, we’ve declared a national disaster & emergency as our country faces severe drought, caused by the el Niño weather phenomenon, influenced by climate change. The prolonged dry spell has impacted both Zambia’s food & energy security that are our key priorities. pic.twitter.com/OKu8Zx62At
— Hakainde Hichilema (@HHichilema) February 29, 2024
Due to influence of El Nino on the 2023-2024 rainy season, Zambia has lost one million hectares (2.5 million acres) from 2.2 million planted crops.
Almost half of the nation’s “planted area” has been “destroyed”, Hichilema said.
He said humanitarian aid would be made available to ensure people do not go hungry, and he urged cooperating partners to provide relief beyond grain.
The president said Zambia had also drawn up plans to import and ration electricity to keep the economy and industries running, especially the heavily power-dependent mines.
Zambia is Africa’s second-largest copper producer.
Hichilema said the energy sector this year was expected to have a deficit close to 450 megawatts or even above 500 megawatts.
The 2024 national budget will be re-aligned so that more resources could be channelled towards addressing the impact of the drought, he added.
“The current projections are that over a million farming households will be affected,” he said.
Zambia defaulted three years ago and is trying to rework its debt under the G20 Common Framework, a programme designed to ensure swift and smooth debt overhauls for low-income nations.
Hichilema said Zambia’s situation was dire and called on its official and private creditors to quickly conclude its debt restructuring process.
“If this process does not close, it’s not just an indictment on Zambia but the global system,” he said.
The naturally occurring El Nino climate pattern, which emerged in mid-2023, usually increases global temperatures for one year afterwards. It is currently fuelling fires and record heat across the world.
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
Palestinians in Gaza say the dramatic rise in prices of what little food is available to buy has made surviving the war much harder.
Published On 29 Feb 2024
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
Six children have died from dehydration and malnutrition at hospitals in northern Gaza, the Health Ministry in the besieged Palestinian territory has said, as the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave worsens.
Two children died at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the ministry said on Wednesday. Earlier it reported that four children died at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, while seven others remained in critical condition.
“We ask international agencies to intervene immediately to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in northern Gaza,” Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said in a statement, as Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue.
“The international community is facing a moral and humanitarian test to stop the genocide in Gaza.”
Kamal Adwan Hospital’s Director Ahmed al-Kahlout said that the hospital had gone out of service due to a lack of fuel to run its generators. On Tuesday, Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia also went out of service for the same reason.
In a video posted on Instagram and verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad verification unit, journalist Ebrahem Musalam shows an infant on a bed inside the pediatric department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, as power comes in and out.
Musalam said the children in the department are suffering from malnutrition and a lack of infant formula, and that necessary devices have stopped working due to the constant power outages as a result of fuel shortages.
Palestinian group Hamas on Wednesday said that the closure of Kamal Adwan Hospital would exacerbate the health and humanitarian crisis in Northern Gaza, which is already teetering on the brink of famine as Israel continues to block or disrupt aid missions there.
On Wednesday, Israel said a convoy of 31 trucks carrying food had entered northern Gaza. The Israeli military office that oversees Palestinian civilian affairs, the Coordination of Government Activity in the Territories (COGAT), also said nearly 20 other trucks entered the north on Monday and Tuesday.
These were the first major aid deliveries in a month to the devastated, isolated area, where the United Nations has warned of worsening starvation.
Israel has held up the entry of aid into Gaza for weeks, with Israeli protesters taking part in demonstrations calling for no aid to be allowed into the territory, even as hunger and disease spread.
UN officials say Israel’s months-long war, which has killed nearly 30,000 people in Gaza, has also pushed a quarter of the population of 2.3 million to the brink of famine.
Project Hope, a humanitarian group operating a clinic in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, has said that 21 percent of the pregnant women and 11 percent of the children under the age of five it has treated in the last three weeks are suffering from malnutrition.
“People have reported eating nothing but white bread as fruit, vegetables, and other nutrient-dense foods are nearly impossible to find or too expensive,” Project Hope said.
Qatar, France Reaffirm in Joint Communique Depth, Breadth of Their Strategic Partnership
🔗To learn more: https://t.co/7sF2yFaDpl#MOFAQatar pic.twitter.com/cLsoIKdFdy
— Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Qatar (@MofaQatar_EN) February 28, 2024
In a joint communique on Wednesday, Qatar and France stressed their opposition to an Israeli military offensive on Rafah in southern Gaza and underlined their “rejection of the killing and starvation suffered by the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”.
They called for the opening of all crossings into Gaza, including in the north, “to allow for humanitarian actors to resume their activities and notably the delivery of food supply and pledged jointly $200m effort in support of the Palestinian population”.
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, also said Israel must allow aid trucks into Gaza in order to address the dire humanitarian crisis.
“Hundreds of aid trucks wait in line to cross into Gaza at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom [Karem Abu Salem] crossings to a starving civilian population,” Egeland said in a social media post, with a video showing scores of aid trucks lined up.
“There has not been a single day we have gotten the needed 500 trucks across. The system is broken and Israel could fix it for the sake of the innocent.”
Hundreds of aid trucks wait in line to cross into Gaza at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings to a starving civilian population. There has not been a single day we have gotten the needed 500 trucks across. The system is broken and Israel could fix it for the sake of the innocent pic.twitter.com/dMb9gTbchJ
— Jan Egeland (@NRC_Egeland) February 28, 2024
Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has meanwhile said that medical workers are struggling to serve hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Gaza who are living in dire conditions with nowhere to go.
“Healthcare has been attacked, it’s collapsing. The whole system is collapsing. We are working from tents trying to do what we can. We treat the wounded. With the displacements, people’s wounds have been infected. And I’m not even talking about the mental wounds. People are desperate. They don’t know anymore what to do,” MSF’s Meinie Nicolai said.
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
Officials from the United Nations have accused Israel of “systematically” blocking aid from reaching desperate Palestinians in Gaza, warning that at least one-quarter of the enclave’s population was a step away from famine without urgent action.
The warnings on Tuesday came as footage from northern Gaza showed Israeli forces again opening fire on Palestinians gathering to collect food in the area.
It was not immediately clear if the shooting led to deaths or injuries.
Israel’s war on Gaza, now in its fifth month, has killed at least 29,878 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The assault began after Hamas – the armed group that governs Gaza – launched attacks inside Israel on October 7, killing some 1,139 people and taking 253 others captive.
Israel’s subsequent military campaign – which has included daily air attacks, a ground offensive into north and central Gaza and the closing of all but one crossing point into the territory – has laid much of the Palestinian enclave to waste and triggered a worsening humanitarian crisis.
“Here we are, at the end of February, with at least 576,000 people in Gaza – one-quarter of the population – one step away from famine,” Ramesh Rajasingham, the deputy chief of the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA), told the UN Security Council (UNSC).
One in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza suffers from acute malnutrition and wasting and practically all the 2.3 million people in the Palestinian enclave rely on “woefully inadequate” food aid to survive, he told the meeting on food security in Gaza.
“If nothing is done, we fear widespread famine in Gaza is almost inevitable and the conflict will have many more victims,” he said.
Rajasingham added that the UN and aid groups face “overwhelming obstacles just to get a bare minimum of supplies into Gaza”. These include crossing closures, restrictions on movement and communication, onerous vetting procedures, unrest, damaged roads and unexploded ordnance, he said.
In Geneva, Jens Laerke, another OCHA spokesman, told reporters Israel’s actions made it almost impossible to deliver aid to Gaza.
“Aid convoys have come under fire and are systematically denied access to people in need. Humanitarian workers have been harassed, intimidated or detained by Israeli forces, and humanitarian infrastructure has been hit,” he said.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said it was “ready to swiftly expand and scale up our operations if there is a ceasefire agreement”.
In the meantime, “the risk of famine is being fuelled by the inability to bring critical food supplies into Gaza in sufficient quantities and the almost impossible operating conditions faced by our staff on the ground,” Carl Skau, the WFP’s deputy executive director, told the UNSC.
“If nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza,” he added.
The WFP earlier this month suspended delivering food aid to northern Gaza, which has almost been completely cut off from aid since late October, after its convoys came under Israeli gunfire and were looted by desperate and hungry Palestinians.
UN agencies say all planned aid convoys into the north of the territory have been denied by Israeli authorities in recent weeks. The last allowed in was on January 23, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
A spokesman for the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said hundreds of trucks carrying aid were ready and waiting at the border between Gaza and Egypt.
“WFP colleagues tell us that they have food supplies at the border with Gaza and, with certain conditions, they would be able to scale up feeding up to 2.2 million people” across the Strip, Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
“Almost 1,000 trucks carrying 15,000 metric tonnes of food are in Egypt ready to move,” he said.
Israel, however, denied blocking aid.
Speaking at the UNSC, Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN Jonathan Miller countered that “it is not Israel who is holding up these trucks”, instead placing the blame on the UN, which he said must distribute aid “more effectively”.
“There is no limit to the amount of humanitarian aid that can be sent to the civilian population of Gaza,” he said, adding that since the beginning of 2024, Israel had only denied 16 percent of requests to deliver aid and those were due to risks the shipments could end up in Hamas’s hands.
The desperate situation in Gaza prompted a rebuke from the United States.
Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, urged its ally Israel to keep border crossings open for humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza and to facilitate [the] opening of more crossings.
“Simply put, Israel must do more,” he said. “We continue to call on Israel to improve deconfliction procedures to ensure aid can move safely and securely.”
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
A two-month-old Palestinian boy has died from starvation in northern Gaza, according to media reports, days after the United Nations warned of an “explosion” in child deaths due to Israel’s war on the besieged enclave.
The Shehab news agency said Mahmoud Fattouh died at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Friday.
Footage, verified by Al Jazeera, shows the emaciated infant gasping for breath in a hospital bed.
One of the paramedics who rushed the boy to the hospital says Mahmoud died from acute malnutrition.
“We saw a woman carrying her baby, screaming for help. Her pale baby seemed to be taking his last breath,” the paramedic says in the video.
“We rushed him to hospital and he was found to be suffering acute malnutrition. Medical staff rushed him into the ICU. The baby has not been fed any milk for days, as baby milk is totally absent in Gaza.”
Mahmoud’s death came as the Israeli government – which launched its assault on Gaza following attacks by Hamas fighters in October – continues to ignore global appeals to allow more aid into the Palestinian enclave.
At least 29,606 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, while 69,737 have been wounded since October 7. The revised death toll in Israel from the October 7 attacks stands at 1,139.
The UN says some 2.3 million people in Gaza are now on the brink of famine.
Israel, which cut off all supplies of food, water and fuel into Gaza at the start of the war, opened one entry point for humanitarian aid in December. But aid agencies say stringent checks by Israeli forces and protests by far-right demonstrators at the Karem Abu Salem crossing, known by Israelis as Kerem Shalom, have hampered the entry of food trucks.
When the supplies do get through to Gaza, aid workers say they are not able to pick up the goods or distribute them because of a lack of security, caused in part due to Israel’s targeted killings of policemen guarding the truck envoys.
The situation is particularly desperate in northern Gaza, which has been almost completely cut off from aid since late October.
Doctors there have described the situation as “beyond catastrophic”.
Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza, said he was seeing “many” deaths among children, especially newborns.
“Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” Abu Safiya told Al Jazeera. “Unfortunately many kids have died in the past weeks … if we don’t get the proper aid urgently, we will be losing more and more to malnutrition.”
Head of Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza Dr Hussam Abu Safiya says that there is a steep rise in malnutrition cases amongst children, especially newborns ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/7sCwvI7aMM
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 25, 2024
Despite the dire situation, UN agencies have not been able to provide help.
The World Food Programme tried to resume deliveries to northern Gaza last Sunday but announced a suspension two days later, citing Israeli gunfire and a “collapse of civil order”. It said its teams witnessed “unprecedented levels of desperation” in the north, with hungry Palestinians mobbing trucks to get food.
The agency said it was working to resume deliveries as soon as possible and called for better security for its staff as well as “significantly higher volumes of food” and the opening of crossing points for aid directly into northern Gaza from Israel.
The UN has meanwhile said its assessments indicate that 15 percent, or one in six, children below two years of age in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished.
“The Gaza Strip is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child deaths, which would compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza,” said Ted Chaiban, UNICEF’s deputy executive director for humanitarian action, in a statement last week.
“We’ve been warning for weeks that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of a nutrition crisis. If the conflict doesn’t end now, children’s nutrition will continue to plummet, leading to preventable deaths or health issues which will affect the children of Gaza for the rest of their lives and have potential intergenerational consequences,” he said.
Before the war, only 0.8 percent of children below five in Gaza were considered acutely malnourished, the UN said.
“Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally.”
Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook
Original Source
