4TheRcrd Mag.

Above: Jacob Amoah (7)
Asebu, Ghana

It’s 6:30 am in Asebu, a rural community in central Ghana. All of the orphans at Asebu’s Home of Hope are fetching water for their morning baths, all of them except Jacob. ‘Jo’ as he is sometimes called, is hiding in the bushes behind his home with feces running down his leg. When I find the seven year old he’s crying, ashamed of his public accident. I plead with him to come into the house and get ready for school. He says nothing, he won’t even look at me. On the ground in front of him are small scraps of paper with his handwriting on them. One piece reads “Plece sir” while another reads, “sack”. As I try to make sense of the scraps Jo’s older sister, Grace, appears with a bucket of water and a sponge. Without saying a word she takes her brother by the hand and leads him in to some neighbouring bushes where she bathes him quietly. For the two siblings, who share one bedroom with 14 other children, the bath is a rare and necessary moment of privacy. It was a year ago this month that Jacob and Grace lost their mother to AIDS.

It was nearly three years ago that Pink Floyd united on stage and stole the show at London’s Live 8 concert. In 2005 Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaign created unprecedented momentum for the cause of African development. That same year at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, the leaders of the world’s 8 richest countries bowed to the public pressure and made a historic commitment to double aid to Africa by 2010.

Back in Asebu it’s 2008 and Jacob is sitting down to eat breakfast. His intentions are clear, he’s the only child at the table not wearing a school uniform. Today’s breakfast is the regular fare, a small serving of rice and tomato stew. As I watch Jacob wolf down the humble meal, I stare at a small bald patch on his head, a symptom of the ringworm he was recently treated for. My mind wanders: “Did the drugs he took do anything? Why does that rice come from Thailand? The food crisis is a rice crisis, rice crisis, that’s hard to say. Rice crisis.” I snap out of it when Jacob asks me to write a note for his teacher. “What should it say?” I ask. “Please Sir, I am sick” he responds with his mouth full of rice. I feel his head and his chest, he’s very hot. Fever and bowel mishaps, these are signs of malaria. I carefully forge the note, adding a measured amount of sloppiness to my handwriting. I consider spelling “Please” with a ‘z’ but end up deciding against it. He takes the note and leaves for school, promising to return soon.

Last week the Africa Progress Panel released a report that summarized the efforts made by G8 nations towards meeting their 2005 commitments. The eleven-member panel is chaired by Kofi Annan and its members include Graca Machel, Bob Geldof, and Tony Blair. The APP report identified a 40 billion US dollar shortfall in aid.1 Simply put, at the halfway point to 2010 less than 25% of the commitments have been met.2

Jacob keeps his promise, quickly returning with a big smile on his face. He’s free from school, free to do whatever he likes. He hands me his notebook and pencil and says “Work.” I quickly fill a page with simple multiplication questions before returning the book and pencil to him. After about twenty minutes he turns in the improvised math quiz to be corrected. Three wrong answers out of fourty. I reward him by drawing a smiley face on his page. He laughs at the sight of my doodle and immediately asks for more work. He passes the rest of the day doing math work. In the evening Jacob and his housemates sit down to dinner, their second meal of the day. They eat corn which has been milled, then fermented and boiled into a sour ball of dough called “banku”. Tonight the banku is accompanied by more tomato stew and a tiny piece of fish, the only protein Jacob will eat today. He finishes the meal quickly and rubs his noticeably swollen belly, a sign of malnutrition.

Positive changes have been made with the modest boost in aid since 2005. In 2007 the number of Africans living with HIV/AIDS who were on life-saving anti-retroviral drugs jumped from 1.3 million to 2.1 million. In the same year the number of African children enrolled in school increased by over 9 million.3 These success stories make broken commitments inexcusable.

Jacob is making no excuses. Today is a new day. He’s wearing his uniform, he’s excited about school and he’s especially excited about breakfast. Something different today, a bowl of corn porridge and, as a treat, half a dozen peanuts sprinkled on top. Jacob picks all the peanuts out of his porridge and puts them in his mouth. His face contorts before he spits them out into his hand. He makes sure the peanuts are clean before carefully placing them in his pocket. Perplexed, I ask him what he’s doing. He smiles at me as he swallows a mouthful of porridge, “Lunch” he says.

Kofi Annan’s High School is less than 30 kilometres away from Jacob’s home. Last week the former UN Secretary General stated: “Africa has made substantial progress in recent years. However, the current food crisis threatens to reverse many of the hard-fought gains that have been made. With 100 million people on the brink of abject poverty, the cost of food will not be measured in the price of wheat and rice, but in the rising number of infant and child deaths across Africa…what is achieved in the months ahead will be more than a test of leadership; it will also determine the very future of the continent.”4

The leaders of the G8 nations will be meeting in Hokkaido, Japan July 7th-9th.

Sadly, there are no plans for a Pink Floyd reunion.

To learn more go to http://www.one.org
Sean Devlin is a Vancouver based filmmaker and comedian currently working in Africa.