There is no Fish too small for a Malawian to eat

As a conservationist I am compelled to feel a little twist of pain every time I see a small fish being cooked or sold or even caught. Here in Malawi that pain turned into an ache and now has subsided into numbness. I guess its the level of poverty, or maybe its the lack of education. But there is literally " NO FISH TOO SMALL FOR A MALAWIAN TO EAT." The saddest part is that the conservationists here (and I use that term loosely) laugh about this statement. Its something they have just accepted. I was out at the ponds today and some kids came by to collect small "wild" fish that we normally try and get rid of, so that they don’t contaminate our ponds, and eat our pond species’ eggs up. These fish are usually tiny and are no fatter than your thumb.

We were harvesting a pond that had a large amount of green algae in it...so we had to scoop out all of the algae and throw it aside to see if we caught any fish. Immersed in the algae were these little wild fish and the kids just all ran towards our algae piles. Hunched over the green goop the kids preceded to hurriedly scavenge for these little fish. At the end each left with a handful or so. They had big mischievous smiles and I would have thought that some had won the lottery the way they grinned.

Not a normal reaction at all, by Canadian kid standards. Normal 4-5 year olds are too busy chasing their tail to scavenge for their families’ next meal. Maybe if chocolate or better yet the latest DVD game was immersed in that algae would they even have made a slight move towards it.