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pop stars and movie stars whose careers are not doing quite as well as they should be are motivated to head out to Mardy. They'll make appeals for cash, food, money, blankets and medical supplies from the point of impact.
Two weeks after the first aid team arrived in Mardy, the first aid aircraft begin to arrive. Huge C130 Hercules transporters are landing like vultures on the arid ground where crops once grew. From the enormous bellies bag of grain are extracted and the people of Mardy are individually fed.
A makeshift hospital is constructed and the sick, those unable to even stand are carried to it. Drips and high protein rations are provided and hundreds of thousands of people are saved from the impending clutches of a natural disaster. It's a miracle
Back home the celebrity circuit is haunted by pop stars and politicians desperate to inflate their egos, to tell anybody who wants to listen how the tragedy was averted, how they stepped in and saved the day. Ad agencies use Mardy as an example to continuously raise cash.
In fact, the good people of
Mardy's pain is graphically reproduced, printed on countless T-shirts and posters, stuck in shop windows and plastered over cash tins. Their suffering is pictured on copious amounts of little envelopes and pushed through millions of front doors.
All down the high street little shops open and the generous nature of the donating public is exemplified in second hand clothes, shoes and discarded blankets. Mardy is quietly forgotten about, after all, there's
hundreds of other African tragedies to worry about. The crusade needs to continue.
Over the coming years Mardy itself, somewhat transformed by the aid agencies and celebrities do-gooders begins to regenerate itself. The local inhabitants decide each man should take a bride. One million weddings take place to celebrate their survival. In the first year after the weddings have taken place, each couple gives birth. Mardy's population expands to three million in the first year, four million in year two, five million in year three. By year four Mardy has six million people, seven million in year five, and eight million in year six. Year seven sees the population continues to rise. It's reach nine million now, but what the hell, the rains have fallen each year, the men are working at a relentless pace and life couldn't be better. God bless those charitable organisations and their kind benefactors. In year eight, the good people of Mardy are starting to worry again. It's late spring, the rains haven't come, the land is as dry as a bone and the crops are failing. In year eight Mardy experiences the hottest summer in living memory. In fact, they can't remember it this hot since that time some years ago when the Aid people
came. Perhaps they'll come again, perhaps they won't.
Already the babies of Mardy are dying. Last month sixty thousand of them perished. The people of Mardy continued to wait for the aid people, but they never turned up this time. Instead, the good people of Mardy had to evacuate the ambient countryside and make for the nearest city. No one knows how many people of Mardy actually died during the great drought, but it's estimated they lost sixty percent of their population, nearly five million people.
And the morale of the story is this, when you constantly place food in to the equation, all you get is an explosion of people and death on a more biblical scale. No matter how well intended the intention, food programmes create the problem we see aroubnd us today. The only way for Africa to regain some sense of dignity is to do nothing, to switch off the cameras and walk quietly away. The Next Ice Age.
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