we're all starving

SHANTO, Ethiopia

This is Bizunesh Hidana. She is 3 years old, and she weighs under 10 pounds. Her limbs, said to be "weak and folded like a praying mantis," can't even bear her fragile weight. Anita Powell from the Associated Press reports that Bizunesh "cannot speak. She doesn't want to eat. Health officials say she is permanently stunted."

The reason for this little girl's condition? The world would have you believing there are any number of reasons. Countrywide drought. Skyrocketing global food prices. Government policies. All of them leading to poverty, malnutrition, and starvation. Sure, all of these things are factors...but they all have one common denominator: a lack of samaritanism.

How is it possible that there are families in this world who are so poor, their children so malnourished, that they are dying by the hundreds each day? That their limbs are swollen or so stick-thin that they can't even move to brush away the flies swarming over their faces? Nor do they care to. All they can do is stare straight ahead in a coma-like gaze, and exist.

How is this possible?

Hatty Newhouse, a nutrition adviser from GOAL (an Irish charity), explains the problem with most aid agencies: "What we're doing at the moment is waiting until children get severely malnourished, taking them into the feeding program, getting them back to a level of moderate malnutrition and then watching them cycle back."

Why is this happening? Why is it that all we seem to be doing is putting out fires where human beings are suffering? Why is it that only when faces like Bizunesh's are thrust in front of us do we remember the poor, the sick, the hungry? Our hearts break, so we write a check or stuff a few bills into a can, and one week later we've completely forgotten. Like we were heroic. Like we did our part, so we can feel good about going to the mall and spending $60 on a pair of shoes or several hundred on a designer purse.

We live in a privileged country, where consumerism reigns supreme. Where bigger, better and faster are what society strives for. Where greed and gluttony, whether you want to believe it or not, control our every move. Our thoughts. Our apathy.

The Western world cannot claim ignorance any longer. The harsh realities of life in other countries for years have been plastered across our television screens and our newspapers. Photos of children so past the point of starvation that you can literally count every one of their bones, their heads far too large and heavy for the rest of their diminishing bodies. Others with bloated bellies standing naked in dumps that are crawling with filth and disease. All of them with the same blank looks on their faces, because they don't cry anymore. They don't have the energy, and even if they did, what would be the point? They used to wonder where the food went, why it wasn't coming...but now they just accept it as a part of life. You're born to die, and nothing more.

Why are people dying of hunger? It makes no sense to me. We're not even talking about cancer or genocide...we're talking about food. The most basic need for the most basic level of survival.

Celebrities are getting paid several million dollars for the first photos of their newborn children. And somewhere, a few hundred more children are dying.

Of hunger.

Everyone is hungry for something. It might be love, money, power, fame, forgiveness, acceptance, an understanding of life and our purpose in it...things that motivate us, that get us out of bed each morning. Things that we waste precious moments, days, even years trying to acquire because we are just...so...hungry for it.

Get on a plane, fly yourself to a third-world country, and provide one bowl of rice and beans to an orphan. Look into his eyes as he eats and smiles back at you, and then tell me...are you still hungry? Drive into the city and buy a hot meal for the first homeless person you see. Sit down with her and talk to her just as you would a friend that you were taking out to lunch. Are you hungry then? Put together a meal and deliver it to a family who's struggling...a woman who's just given birth...that weird old lady next door. Now are you hungry?

Do you still want? Do you still need? Do you have to have everything, be everything, understand everything? Does the world and everything in it need to make sense to you? Do you have to have it all figured out, all your ducks in a row, all your pawns in the right spot? Do you need to have more, see more, do more?

Or do you just need to provide a bowl of rice and beans?

I'm convinced that life is really that simple. We're too blinded by politics and materialism and societal norms to see it, but life is about rice and beans. That's it. We're not here for ourselves, we're here for each other. We're here to feed and to clothe and to quench and to visit and to look after. We're here to encourage and strengthen and move forward, together, always in love.

How did we manage to get so far away from all of that?

And more importantly, can we ever get close to it again?

Bizunesh, by the way, means "Plentiful."