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Wanna get high? Huff this shit, yo.
Dublo7
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Africa[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Children high on sewage[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]At the Lusaka sewage ponds, two teenage boys plunge their hands into the dark brown sludge, gathering up fistfuls and stuffing it into small plastic bottles. They tap the bottles on the ground, taking care to leave enough room for methane to form at the top. A sour smell rises in the hot sun, but the boys seem oblivious to the stench and the foul nature of their task. [/FONT]
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They are manufacturing "Jenkem", a disgusting, noxious mixture made from fermented sewage. It is cheap, potent and very popular among the thousands of street-children in Lusaka. When they cannot afford glue or are too scared to steal petrol, these youngsters turn to Jenkem as a way of getting high. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]"It lasts about an hour", says one user, 16-year-old Luke Mpande, who prefers Jenkem to other substances. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]"With glue, I just hear voices in my head. But with Jenkem, I see visions. I see my mother who is dead and I forget about the problems in my life." [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica] Symptom of poverty [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Sniffing sewage is a symptom of the desperate plight of Zambia's street-children. There are thought to be some 75,000 in the country as a whole - a number that has doubled in the past eight years. [/FONT]
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With the Aids epidemic affecting an estimated one in four adults in urban areas, and the government's harsh privatisation policies throwing thousands out of work, it is the children who have suffered the most. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Sikwanda Makono is an education specialist at the Ministry of Health. "Now that the economy is going down, we see more and more of our younger boys going into the streets. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]"And girls too. If you drive around at night, you see very young girls looking for men, to merely get something to survive." [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Abandoned [/FONT]
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The children can also no longer rely on the extended family, once the backbone of African life. This traditional safety net is now on the verge of collapse. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Children are sent out onto the streets to earn a living, or treated cruelly by relatives already struggling to support their own families, or simply abandoned by parents, who cannot afford to feed and clothe them. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Victor Chinyama of the United Nations Children's Fund in Lusaka says it is imperative that the Zambian government gets to grips with this problem. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]"So far, one doesn't get the feeling that this has been recognised as priority, or as a problem that needs to be nipped in the bud," he says. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]"This problem is on the rise and the sooner it is dealt with, the better." [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica] Temporary respite [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Substance-abuse offers a temporary respite in an otherwise harsh world. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Nobody knows exactly where the idea for making Jenkem came from, but it has been used by street-children in Lusaka for at least two years. Nason Banda of the Drug Enforcement Agency is not proud when he says that it is unique to Zambia. He shudders when he sees the boys at the sewage ponds, scavenging for faecal matter to make Jenkem. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]"It's unimaginable" he says. "It hits right at the heart to see a human being coming down a level, to be able to dip his hand into a sewage pond, picking out the material and not caring about anything but the feeling of getting high."
BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/406067.stm
Crafty little pricks.
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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Dublo7 on
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Wait a second, I'm not at the BBC website at all!
You tricked me!
Very nice and quite the good admin.
You just get stressed out on the job.
I bet it was just observation and trial and error.
But how many of us are actually doing anything?
I'll be the first to raise my hand and say that I'm not doing anything about it at the moment, but perhaps we should shift the way we approach the problems of the world. Perhaps we should stop taking into consideration the idea that charity is an "extra" and consider that it is, in fact, our duty. Maybe we should stop thinking that those that are charitable to above and beyond and instead consider those that are not charitable as not fulfilling their duty and obligation.
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
Punch yourself in the fucking head.
There's no way they somehow arrived at scooping shit into bottles from trial and error. Like, if I was trying to get high, I'd probably start eating random plants or something. Not sniffing feces.
Ahah, if you read my post afterwards, you would see I wasn't being serious with that remark.
Tube is going nuts.
Egyptians used to smoke ground up mummy. I don't see huffing shit as being that far a stretch.
it couldn't be that in fact they are just idiots and I am pointing it out
I hope you drown on your mother's blood.
Yes, because a field full of wheat and corn will make everything better, from lack of sanitation, clean drinking water, government sponsored ethnic cleansing death squads, AIDS epidemics, and soul crushing poverty.
There's a difference between people who won't do anything to help themselves and people so destitute and fucked in every conceivable way. These poor people...well, they've basically been fucked in every conceivable way.
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That may seem like a good thing, but the reality is that it makes it very difficult to impossible for local farmers throughout Africa to make a living because they can't compete against American crops so they either barely subsist or they quit and try to find work in the cities. Genetically modified organisms have also been touted as the key to solving world hunger, and I'm not inherently opposed to GMO's but the approach such companies (like Monsanto) have taken is to focus on wheat, corn, and soybean (to list a few) strains that are very productive in the U.S. resulting in monocropping (which opens another whole can of worms) but tend not to grow that well in sub-saharan Africa. But they go ahead and send them these seeds at a discount or sometimes even for free. And of course the fertilizers and pesticides that we've relied on for so long. It's really more about getting them into the same cycle of dependence on the big agrobusinesses than about finding local solutions to the problem.
There are some organizations that are taking a more long term approach and are working locally to find low tech, sustainable solutions to enabling local African farmers to grow more food using local, native strains of crops so that they're not reliant on the west but with our massive farming subsidies still in place, it's an uphill battle.
I believe quite strongly that our farming subsidies need to shit from the big agrobusiness that have industrialized farming to a ridiculous extent to subsidizing smaller, local farmers that are growing better product that doesn't waste fossil fuels being shipped/trucked across the continent/world but is being consumed locally.
so im pretty happy
sucks for all you suckers that read it tho
Like I dunno, giant tasty cockroaches.
It was mean, but also hilariously funny.
We have a twin room with en-suite booked in hell for us.
suiiiiiite
well this is very good
my heroin addiction has been getting quite costly as of late
Then again, who wants a bunch of depressed, brain-damaged (from drugs), African kids running around?
but i vaguely remember them making some point about how genetically modified crops actually produce less food or something like that
i wish i could remember so i could say how it works but maybe someone here has heard somehting along these lines
also that there is already a shitload of food for everyone in the world but it doesnt get spread as it should because of politics or business or something
man these are not very reliable points i am making here
Fuck that noise. Until we invent cars that run on diamonds, Africa doesn't mean shit.
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