Signs Of Life

There was a popular song about 30 years ago which some of you might remember. It went, “They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain, there’s hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain" ...and ending with “What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.”

It only needs a little tweaking to update it for 2023. They’re actually starving in Africa, while the riots are in France. There are still hurricanes in Florida, though, and both Texas and California need rain. There are floods here, earthquakes there, open war between two countries, random massacres in another, and famine in more places than we can keep track of. We no longer see pictures of starving children, though; are we just too jaded to care or is it that the media is concentrating on other, more “important” things? The hollow-eyed Ethiopians children used to haunt us... but they look just like the Somalis who looked just like the Rwandans and a generation ago the Chinese and the generation before that the Armenians. And now the North Koreans are silently starving to death while still fielding the third largest standing army in the world. Aid workers say that it doesn’t really look like they’re starving when you look at them; they don’t have the usual bloated stomachs. But when you ask, you find out that the little boy you thought was 3 is really 5; the dainty little 8-year old is actually going to be a teenager next year... if she makes it. They sleep a lot and they’re too tired to play.

Until television most of us had only a one-dimensional idea of what starvation looked like. We had still photographs, and they’re bad enough. But now we have other, more vivid images to put beside those fragile, stick-drawn children. And we have also seen how people behave under these circumstances. There are three different kinds of responses. Those who no longer have the strength even to stand in line to wait for their share of the little food available are completely passive. Others seize their ration quickly and fearfully, scurrying away to eat in some place of temporary safety before it is snatched away by someone stronger or more desperate. And finally there are the predators, who storm the ration trucks and get whatever they can, eating some themselves, wasting much, using the remainder to buy power and influence.

And you know what? Even after the food trucks arrive in enough numbers to feed everyone at last, even after people can go home and their first crops come in, even after new muscle begins to cushion those angular little bodies and there’s enough energy left over to skip rope or throw a ball, the patterns remain. Children once hungry may hide and hoard food for years. Some may become predators. Some remain passive and fearful. The damage is very hard to overcome.

A couple I knew back in the Twin Cities had adopted several children from overseas. I didn’t know the man very well but the woman whom I’ll call Betsy was in a Bible study with me for years and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who radiated warmth and comfort and welcome more than she did. I was there during the two or three years it took for them to come to terms with the fact that if their eldest child was ever going to be able to function in society it would not be while under their care. He was, I think, Cambodian; he had been found nearly dead from starvation near a refugee camp in Thailand and was unable or unwilling to speak; doctors guessed his age at around three but couldn’t be sure. Anyway, Nat had a lot of behavior problems, some severe enough to put their other children at risk. But what I remember Betsy agonizing over most was the food. Mind you, they had had him already for over six years when I met her. They had been feeding him lavishly for those years but he still couldn’t believe that the next meal would ever come. He always finished his food long before anyone else did, gobbling each morsel down as fast as he could go as if someone were going to snatch it off his plate. He used to steal his brother and sister’s Halloween and Easter candy. Betsy would discover stale waffles and leftover French fries in his bedclothes, and saltines or sugar cubes in his underwear drawer. This constant reminder of the terrible hunger that still clearly obsessed Nat led her to excuse and endure his violence for far longer than was good for her other children. Betsy kept hoping that eventually Nat would believe he was safe. But he never did.

Most of us have never known that kind of hunger, and I pray God that we never will. And even though there is poverty and hunger in this country it is nowhere as pervasive and embedded and unending as it is in many other parts of the world.