2006 Essay Contest – Winning Essay

January 8, 2008

 

What I Know for Certain

 

By Jaime Gentile

There are few things that I know for certain. There is one fact, however, that I certainly cannot accept: that this is the best of all possible worlds. I deal better with stories than with numbers. The issue of world hunger is not one of faceless statistics, but of people and their stories. Unfortunately, the story of the starving child is not a book filled with colorful pictures and a happy ending, but a devastating tale with dreary images and no clear conclusion. I am no pessimist; this story certainly could have the happiest of all endings. But in a world where globalization increases the polarization between the rich and the poor, the ending is looking somewhat grim. The story of the world has a silver lining because the most powerful force is love. It is with a heart full of hope that I attempt to struggle with the issue of global hunger and to tell the tale of the starving child.

I have a godson in Peru named Julio. He lives with his family in Chulucanas, where there is no electricity or running water. His kitchen is in the backyard and his house has dirt floors. The six members of his family share one bed. I met Julio two years ago on a mission trip with a group of students from my university. We went to Julio’s home to teach his family how to build an adobe stove with a chimney. Their old method of cooking, a fire on the floor, was unhealthy for his mother because she had to lean over the fire to cook and because it released smoke into the house.

On our last day with the family, Julio’s mother asked me to be his godmother. She said that, “Every time I use this stove, I will think of you and the love you have shown us.” In a powerful lesson in humility, I learned that my work there was not going to save the world and or end world hunger, but it showed another human being that I cared. And she, in turn, showed me that she cared. Every man wants to change the world, but is not willing to change himself. Why do I have carpeting, my own room, and hot showers, while Julio has dirt, a family bed, and a bucket of cold water? This is the result of my greed and ignorance. Julio is a starving child.

We called her “Sad Eyes.” She was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to HIV positive parents who died shortly after her birth. She was taken in by her aunt and uncle who loved and cared for her, until they discovered that she was HIV positive. They then abandoned her. She has pierced ears, which struck me because someone loved her enough to get her ears pierced and to buy her earrings. Now, an orphan in a group home, she no longer wears earrings.

During the two weeks that I volunteered at the orphanage that Sad Eyes lives at, I never saw her smile. A melancholy eighteen-month-old, she always appears to be on the verge of tears. She seems to realizes that her short life will be filled with hunger and suffering. AIDS is not a pretty disease. A priest who visited the orphanage said that, “you can tell when someone is dying of AIDS by their eyes. They look hopeless, completely alone.” They are, one could argue, sad eyes.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, every child has the rights to survival and development, to education, to non-discrimination, and to a voice in matters concerning him or herself (www.unicef.org

In Zulu, Nkosinathi’s name means, “Christ is now here.” When I lived with his family in their village in rural South Africa during my semester abroad, Nkosinathi slept on the cement floor in the kitchen with mice and ants, so that I could have his bed. He told me he was sleeping at a friend’s house. Every evening we sat around a candle and played cards. We often sang the South African national anthem which begins “Nkosi Sikelel i’Afrika,” meaning God bless Africa, and speaks of hope for a peaceful future. South Africa, a country of contradictions, has overcome great adversity and tragedy, but is still a country ravaged by poverty, disease, racism, and violence.

When Nkosinathi grows up he wants to move to Hollywood and become a singer. He has a beautiful voice, but when he sings his ribs protrude from behind his thin T-shirt. Nkosinathi will probably never leave his village, and there is a 20% probability that he will contract AIDS. It is a safe bet that he will never see Hollywood. His father died of tuberculosis five years ago and his mother abandoned him. His grandmother supports him and his cousin on a small government grant for foster care.

When Nkosinathi sang their national anthem about hope and love, I smiled and told him that I could not wait to hear his first album. Nkosinathi is a starving child.

We have created a world separated into haves and have-nots. But in such a system, we are all have-nots. I cannot sleep comfortably in my bed when I know that Julio must share his with five other people. I cannot join my parents at the dinner table without thinking of Sad Eyes sipping from a bowl of rice on the floor alone. I cannot listen with pride to our national anthem without hearing Nkosinathi singing his by candlelight. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa teaches the idea of Ubuntu, which “speaks about the essence of being human: that my humanity is caught up in your humanity because we say a person is a person through other persons.” As long as one member of humanity is starving, we are all starving. There is no “us and them,” but rather one human family. The suffering of this family is found most prominently in the lonely eyes and swollen bellies of the children. Fortunately, the story is not yet finished. Where there is love, there is hope. This, I know for certain.

2006 Essay Contest – Winning Essay

January 8, 2007

 

Photographs

 

By Christine Kwon

A photograph speaks one-thousand words.

But my pictures sing, in tired, far-away voices. They line the walls of my room, and the whispers of little children hush me to sleep. The photos are graced with the tilting silhouettes of children, children who hobble like the towering Pisa of Italy—falling sideways from hunger. This morning I received another package from my mother, and it felt leathery and weather-worn from all the rough handling. My mother is a photojournalist.

The yellow tape peels off easily and a tightly-bound wad of photographs falls into my lap. Her pictures depict landscapes of destruction and waste. There are photographs of buildings in ruins. There are photographs of culture in ruins. But most importantly, there are photographs of human ruins. Grandmothers with Mother Theresa eyes, pupils traced delicately in a cat’s yellow, gape at me under a waterfall of wrinkles. So many pictures of broken mothers, clutching their litters of children, leave me to wonder where are all the fathers? But in times of war, a daddy is an unknown luxury.

The pictures that hang on my wall, though, are the ones of children. The children are like the stick and ball models I assemble in Chemistry class. There is nothing padding their bones. Their skin stretches for miles. I can see their hummingbird hearts thrash against their fragile rib cages. I imagine smuggling them all into my apartment. They could have my bed, they could sleep in the bath tub, they could sleep on the kitchen table and on the sofa. In the morning, bushy-eyed and hungry, they would wake up to the smell of banana pancakes. I would whisk them off to nursery-school. I want to give them everything in the world.

Unfortunately, the very children that haunt my dreams will most likely never know the satisfaction of a warm meal, the nurture of a loving hand, the opportunity that comes with education. Instead, the only feeling that these babies are acquainted with is hunger. Real hunger. Endless, insatiable hunger. The mouths of these little children are cavernous, they could eat up the whole world and still feel hungry. My mother, in a distant voice, tells me how their bones are stunted in growth, how malnutrition paints their skin a rainbow-myriad of colors.

I trace the outline of a little boy’s jutting ribs. On the back of this particular photo, my mother has sketched a brief story about Abdul Samed. His twin sister and he had shared everything. From the womb to their last night together, they were inseparable. They often squirreled away food to present to each other when the other was aching with hunger. They, my mother told me, were tangled in the same blanket, when one morning Abdul woke up to find Amna cold and hard. Cold and hard, he had said. He repeated those two words as a mantra for the rest of the day, trembling.

Amna died, my mother told me, from starvation.

My whole life I’ve been surrounded by children. I take care of the children next door, and I watch them tumble into the playground outside, rattle off multiplication tables, enjoy chocolate pudding and whipped cream as second desserts. I cannot help but compare them to the children my mother send me every month. I have children in Somalia, Yemen, Niger, Sierra Leone, and now, Afghanistan and Iraq. They all have different stories, most too difficult to hear. But there is one common thing that every single child shares, girl or boy: starvation. The hunger is evident everywhere.

Little boys show the camera cool tricks. They can circle the entire lengths of their waists with their skeletal fingers. They can touch the dirty soles of their feet to their ears. Little girls with bird-like legs dance. They twirl to music in their heads, music that no one else can understand. I’ve had the honor of corresponding with such a girl, a few years ago. We wrote and drew pictures for each other. In greatest confidence we told each other our fears and aspirations.

She told me her biggest secret with great pride. “If you don’t want to feel sick”, she had written, “then drink a lot of water. Your belly feels big and you don’t feel sick anymore”. I didn’t know how to answer her revelation. How could she understand that I was not plagued with hunger as she was? That her world was not at all like mine? I didn’t have long to worry about my response, however, when I received notice from her orphanage that she collapsed one day. She was dancing. The man on the phone, in all his nonchalance, was surprised at my grief. This kind of thing is normal, he tried to assure me. He would find me another girl to write to.

I want no more children, however. No more pictures of emaciated girls and boys. My eyes are already open to the destitute life that is the future of every baby born in a third-world country. I’m no photographer, so these are my one-thousand words. I want to expose everyone in America, everyone in a comfortable home, reading this, to understand that the problem of starving children is alive and well. I want everyone to hear the stories of my children. They have nothing to eat so they fill themselves with hope, with dreams. They don’t dare speak their desires, because out loud they are too vulnerable, too easy to destroy. So they whisper them. One-thousand times over. They sing me to sleep and I wake up and live my life.

But their nightmares never cease.