Hunger

  I want to write about hunger, but the words keep getting stuck each time I try. Maybe this isn’t the place to talk about it.   Maybe there’s no good place to talk about it. Maybe I just can’t figure out how to share all the complicated aspects of hunger.  The truth is, there’s no way for me to capture this thing of hunger. If  you really want the truth, I don’t know that much about hunger. I’m surrounded by a lot of hungry kids, but that doesn’t make a person an expert.  The thing I can say for certain is that the reasons are many and difficult to understand. I can tell you that this season is called the “hunger gap,” the season when the crops are beginning to grow, but are not enough to feed everyone, and when there is little food left from the last harvest. I can tell you that the littlest ones have it the worst, and in Sudan they estimate one in four kids die before their fifth birthday.  I’ve learned that the reasons  for hunger are really complex.  Because tradition still dictates many treatments, mothers are instructed not to feed their sick kids because it only makes them sicker. Seems to reason the same folks are telling moms not to give water if their child has diarrhea, as it only makes them have more diarrhea.  Some tell me that the rate of malnourished kids skyrocket this time of year, because  mothers are very busy converting grains to the local beer, a very time consuming process, and don’t have much time left over for their kids.  Even foreign aid, which seems to be such a great fix for hunger, can create a cycle that leads to more hunger. Food is shipped from another region for a crisis and the local farmers cannot sell the crops they do have to the locals, as an agency has now brought it to them for free. The farmers perhaps go out of business or lose interest in all that hard work when food is coming for free. The next year the farmers don’t plant, the aid workers move on to another needy area, and food doesn’t  come for another year.  Violence takes it’s toll on hunger, displacing folks from the ground they’ve cultivated, or keeping needed food arriving to areas where folks are vulnerable.  Diseases, like Measles and Malaria and Pneumonia and diarrhea, stalk kids who don’t have reserves to fight.

   Even more complex then the causes are the solutions. I’ll be honest, I don’t have any. We run a therapeutic feeding program from our clinic, and get referrals of all the really malnourished kids from the region.  If they are severely malnourished when they arrive, we begin the delicate process of introducing fortified milk, calculated to give protect the organs and maintain equilibrium while we introduce  food again. As soon as possible, we switch them to a milk fortified with proteins and vitamins.  When they are steadily gaining weight, we switch them to packets of peanut-butter like mixture that allows them to continue their treatment at home. This is a great solution for the kids that come through our doors, but not a lasting one.  It’s sometimes good to remember that we’re stepping in on a centuries old culture that has always known waves of hunger and seasons of enough.  

I thought for a long time that these kids were hungry because the world had forgotten them, and we in the West were to blame for ignoring them. I truly understand now that it’s not that simple. Feed kids for too long and the family or the country may stop working to find a way to do it themselves.   Forget about sections of developing countries plagued by floods or war, and kids die in devastating numbers.  Not simple.

/I hold these kids with open hands. I’m happy that I’m with them today, I’m truly thankful for the work of NGO’s like Medair that address the issue, and I let go of what I cannot do.

What can I do?

I can be thankful, really thankful, Oh-my- God-you –didn’t – have – to-give- me –food –again- thankful, for the Ugali and rice and stew and lentils that land on my plate. I can remember them, I can pray for them, I can admit that I don’t understand what it’s like to be hungry, but feel for them anyway.  The longer I’m here, the more I’m convinced that I was born there, and they were born here, and that’s the way of it, and beyond that I can’t change how it’s always been for them. But, as always, I can remember them,  hope for them,  and live my life with the whole world in mind, not taking for granted the things God has chosen to give me, not feeling awful for having it, recognizing that they may be privy to gifts I’ll never understand.

 Told you I didn’t know how to write about it. Maybe now you believe me.  I can only share what I can see before me, and feel very small when I start looking for answers. As always, I’m convinced that God loves the hungry more then I do, and that He hasn’t forgotten them.  I hope you don’t either, and I hope we don’t give up remembering, even if I don’t have a lot of good suggestions on how to change things. If you made it to the end of this long posting, I’m going to have to trust you care, too, and I’m happy we’re all in this together.