Flicking through my photos I came across this one of eldest with an after-school banquet. This is not set up, this is seriously what the kid gets himself when he comes home from school. His breakfast is similar. Apart from my grandfather I never met a person who ate so much raw food in such volumes. The stuff in the white bowl is a bowl of frozen peas, still frozen. We go through bags of the things each week.
Anyway, that isn’t what I wanted to say, what I wanted to say is this:
1. For real? I took a photo of this? I didn’t say, ‘Oh, God, you are putting your disgusting feet in their disgusting socks all over the kitchen bench, get down from there immediately.’
2. How ugly is our kitchen? I have tried many things to disguising it, most notably leaving every piece of kitchen equipment on the bench in an effort to hid said bench. But its ugliness cannot be hidden.
3. How lucky are we? Rejoicing in our child’s appetite. At the film festival, the mister saw a film about food waste. I know a lot of facts about malnutrition from my last job of course, but hearing the mister reciting the statistics has reminded me about a few things I hadn’t given enough thought to over the last little while. More food gets produced than could get eaten, but each year, millions of children die from the effects of malnutrition.
Not long before I found this photograph, I was making a donation to Oxfam’s East Africa Food Crisis Appeal and found that until the end of November, the Australian Government is matching any donations made. Possibly that isn’t the best way for a government to approach aid, but I don’t suppose the people of East Africa care too much about how the food aid gets there. (updated to add: I don’t mean to infer I think you shouldn’t make a donation there, in fact, I meant to infer the opposite – see discussion below in the comments for further clarification)
And now that I’ve spent the last half hour (re)reading about malnutrition around the world, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this photo.
I think my thoughts would come as a triplet.
Thought the first: Gratitude for a healthy attitude
Thought the second: Gratitude for the means to indulge same
Thought the third: Now to make a donation …..
I mean gratitude for a healthy appetite. Some days I despair of myself.
Oh, I thought you were talking about his healthy attitude to food, which I thought, ‘Well, yes, that’s a good point’. So there you go, it made perfect sense to me.
The Australian Government has also given $128 million of its very own money, according to the AusAid web page. The dollar for dollar thing is just a way of making people donate more and faster. Apparently it has worked. (Not it is has worked, which is what I wrote the first time.) *Disclosure – I work for the Australian Government, but not for AusAid or any other money sharing bit.
Yes, probably I sound brusque and distrusting about it, but I didn’t mean to. Actually, I have made a slightly higher donation than I was intending to because of it, so I don’t doubt it would work.
I have an MA in development studies and I always wanted to work more directly in aid, and I think I was just thinking out loud in a, ‘Things are changing on the aid front’ and ‘wonder what the ethics are of that’ and ‘wonder what the discussions are like at the AGM’ and so on.
Uhm, may I ask why do you need a mirror in the kitchen?
Because the kitchens in houses and apartments here are extremely poorly designed, and very often small and dark. I put the mirrors opposite the hole in the wall that passes for a window, trying to get better light and general ambience. You win the prize for powers of observation.
When we were looking for an apartment, I would say that at least half the kitchens we saw had no window at all.
Ha! I thought the mirror was a strange narrow cupboard….
And even though I agree the bench is not great, you have very nice appliances.
And, even though I do donate to Oxfam, the fact that the government were matching did make me donate more, so it is probably worth doing, though I feel that it appeals to something not especially nice in people (including me -I thought, I’ll just make the govt donate a bit more….which oughtn’t be my strategy)
I thought that too!
Our kitchen here in Idaho Falls is much uglier than that. It has no window, although you can look over the bench into the lounge room, which has a glass sliding door, showing a view of a concrete balustrade which interrupts the view of the large car park. (A disproportional amount of land-mass around here is devoted to car parks.) We have a ground floor flat which is useful with a baby but depressing otherwise. We never use the sliding door because it only opens onto a couple of square metres of concrete. We never get any direct sunlight at all. Only one more month…
Apart from our kitchen, our apartment is pretty nice. Not as nice as our Adelaide home in some ways, but much nicer in others. Quite a lot of the kitchens I saw while we were looking for this apartment were converted bathrooms.
You *did* see the ENTIRE WALL of circa-1973 orange flowered-tiles in our kitchen, didn’t you? (http://blurbfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2011/09/close-ups-apart-from-discussing.html)