Hunger

This morning, once again, I saw a picture of a hungry child. I have decided that never in my life have I really experienced hunger. Of course, I have been hungry and have eaten as though I were famished and would never eat again; yet I was just hungry, not in a condition of hunger.

I grew up during the great depression. Dad was a teaching minister in a Lutheran church and we didn’t always get his meager monthly salary. Money may have been scarce, but food was not. Even in the bleakest months my mom would have me crawl under the house to retrieve some of our homegrown potatoes that we stored there. She would open a quart or two of canned red beets. That red juice/water made a great covering for the potatoes. We had butchered hogs and saved the bones from which almost all the meat had been cut to make sausages. The leftover bones we called “knochen fleish”. Mother boiled these. We added bit of mustard, combined that with the boiled potatoes and beets and a glass of fresh milk. Soon we certainly did not have to deal with hunger!

When I would come home from school I felt hungry. If all that was available was a slice of bread with a bit of jelly on it I soon learned that if I complained to Mother her stock reply would come echoing back, “Wenn du hungrig bhist, dennn scheckt auch jelly brut gut”. If you are hungry then jelly bread tastes good, too!

Another hunger lesson taught me by my father was a Biblical quote: 
”If any would not work, neither should he eat.” The message was clear If you expect to eat, do your chores. Yet dad was always equally quick to say, “Now remember, too, that some people want to work but are unable to do so. They are in danger of hunger. Those we must help feed.”

My first encounter with persons who were suffering from hunger came in Hong Kong in the mid 1950s. To this day there is an encounter burned into my consciousness. We had been there less than a month. I had taught a late night class and was walking back to our tenement flat along the northern end of Nathan Road. I walked by a middle-aged man. In his arms he held, pieta-like, his starving young son who may have been ten. His stomach was not extended but absolutely flat. There was no flesh or fat on any of his skeleton. His eyes were those staring orbs always seen in the face of those starving. The father looked at me with pleading eyes, not saying a word. I did not know a word of Chinese. I paused just long enough to pull out of my pocket and place into the hands of the father a one Hong Kong dollar bill. The father’s eyes looked back at me with a full-bodied look of gratitude as he thanked me. I went on my way home and yet I remember the whole incident as though it were last night. A father on the street holding his son dying of hunger, completely dependent upon some stranger walking by and dropping in one dollar (17 cents in US money!).

Since then I have seen a few of the approximately 1 billion hungry people in the world and am still haunted by some of those extended stomachs, vacant eyes, pleading parents in India and Africa. Some of the 4% of American citizens who are hungry confront me even in affluent San Diego County

It is easy for me to become so overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of this challenge that I am tempted to try to just push the whole issue out of my mind. But that doesn’t always work. So in my very small way I try to help the hungry at the San Diego TACO homeless feeding program, at Bread for the World which deals with hunger in the USA and Lutheran World Relief which takes a global perspective. Mine is just a drop into an empty food plate but I do put in the drop.

Much more to say, but I need to run. It’s time for lunch. Food