Abstract
A country road west of Kathmandu. Our bus broke down, a replacement should arrive sometime or another. A small group of aid workers, dieticians, and agricultural experts is standing around and looking at the Dhaulagiri basked in the light of the setting sun. It will be getting cold soon, very soon and we start to wonder where we can find ‘shelter’ until our replacement vehicle gets here. We find ourselves among small fields with trees, if they can still be called that, lining the outer perimeters. Mostly, they are just a bare trunk without any branches except for a green cap at the very top from what was spared. The branches were all cut off to be used as firewood and now rise in smoke form from the reddish brown huts, which stand like tiny molehills in the smoky fields. At the side of the road, in front of one such hut a wispy man is standing and silently beckons us to come in by opening the door. The smell of soot and animals permeates the semidarkness of the inside of the hut. The man sets glasses down onto a wooden table and invites us to drink some tea. Tucked away in the background, a young woman stands in front of the soot-churning stove along with three children who smile as, full of curiosity, they inch their way toward us.
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Biesalski, H.K. (2013). Hidden Hunger. In: Hidden Hunger. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33950-9_2
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