This afternoon it finally started to rain. Watch out, I whispered to the ants on the patio, you had it coming. The temps have dropped from hot, humid and sticky still to cool, damp and very birdsong noisy.

I am working on the ultimate test to determine whether I will be fit for work tomorrow. So far I failed all attempts to iron or go for a bit of a walk. And washing the kitchen floor just now was quite an effort and has produced a level of shaky exhaustion that in no way corresponds to the size of our kitchen or the area within it covered by floor tiles. Maybe I'll recover dramatically over night. There's hope. At least I have been sleeping a lot since Thursday.

Whatever, I am resting in splendid extravagance. While R is downstairs in the clean kitchen, preparing delightful meals, from time to time running upstairs with a fresh cup of tea for me, I am reading through my next assignment, this one on the human rights of peasant farmers, the effects of exporting dumping our agricultural surplus in African countries thereby destroying viable local markets. Just one statistic: 60% of the world's hungry are women and girls. Actually, the correct term is 'suffering from chronic hunger'.

One of the accepted definitions of chronic hunger:  

a perpetual hunger, starvation, or famine due to unequal distribution of wealth or other social injustice

Sometimes it feels like some form of penance - if I only knew what that actually entails - us here in this house, safe and comfortable, harvesting our own excellently tender green asparagus, listening to the rain, and the absolute luxury of having the means, the time, the skill and the interest to translate such information so that people with far more dedication, time, skills and, most of all, conviction may use my minimal contribution together with whatever miserable means are at their disposal to try and make our world a better place.



 Jean Ziegler
in an excerpt from We Feed The World.