At the remote yalumet village of kabwum district in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea, I woke up early as 5am and got my patrol gears set for a 5 day visit to remote rural smallholder farmers. That was in 2008.
In just a moment later my escort ancillary name waminao wamin arrived. Without further asking any questions I reckon everything are just fine so we set out our first 2 hours climbing steep mountain which had 26 total track crescent we must encounter (bends) before reaching the top.
It would take us a total of 8 hours walk to reach our destined location. On reaching the top we continued a straight sloppy journey for 5 hours and rested just after crossing a river and trekking up another hill to it’s top.
I was very sweaty and though we sat for quite a time about 40 minutes I can feel my tummy going really empty and motivates me to find food. Unfortunately I forgot to take one meal for the road so I had nothing to eat that time.
I looked at my escort and saw him removing his cooked sweet potato which he roasted last night and started peeling to eat. He also had a cucumber and little bunch of ripe bananas I saw on his lap.
I asked him, “wamin spare me one of your desserts please because Iam feeling hungry now” However, he responded by saying this to me, “do you eat”?.. if you do eat then take with you food everytime. That faced me off and blow out my mind to realize what a terrible mistake I have done for not planning to prepare food for the road.
With reference to the above story, however, everyone are subject to hunger gap and always make every effort to ensure that the hunger gap is not faced unconditionally as they move over each day and into a new day. Hunger gap is very much the reason why everyone utilize their time and quality of their resources at minimizing it’s impact like starvation.
Even a remote rural villager knows best with his estimated calculation that by establishing 5 garden annually he would make his family livelihood sustainable. That’s his annual duty. In his garden he knows exactly what type of perennials ,arable and annual species of food varieties would keep them going and overcome hunger gap. Therefore every day the only hardworking people make the difference using their best effort to create a balance in making available food to overcome hunger gap.