Childhood Hunger

Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter From the Front Page

March 2002

Dear Friend,

Newspapers are supposed to bring us information we did not know before. Sometimes they tell us things we could never have imagined.

That was the case for me last Friday when a front page article in the New York Times described how Afghans in remote villages, on the verge of starvation from years of drought, had sold their children in exchange for bags of wheat. For many, struggling to stay alive by chewing bitter blades of grass, it was a last tearful transaction in a long line that began with bartering farm animals and metal cooking utensils, and ended in picking the five year-old or ten year-old in their family that could command the best price.

After nearly two decades of witnessing hunger first hand through the work of Share Our Strength, there is little about hunger I cannot imagine. From Ethiopia to East St. Louis, I have seen the toll it takes on body and spirit. I have heard New England doctors testify about treating children accidentally burned because their parents sought to keep them warm with light bulbs when they didn't have enough money to feed them and heat their homes in winter. I have carefully stepped through fields of dead cattle during drought in the horn of Africa. I have seen women walk 8-10 hours across the desert for clean water.

Closer to home, I've seen long lines of homeless men waiting for soup and sandwiches on McPherson Square a block from the White House. There is much that outrages me, but not much that surprises anymore. Until Friday's New York Times. I have not seen and could never imagine parents selling the children they'd brought into the world for sacks of wheat.

What it does enable us all to imagine is what we're up against in the fight against hunger. Waging war against Al Qaeda, our country has come to know something about an elusive enemy that wreaks havoc in a far away place, disappears when attacked, only to resurface somewhere else. That is the nature of terrorism. It is the nature of hunger too. But hunger can be even more intransigent. It is mankind's oldest scourge. Though it retreats from time to time, it has never surrendered.

Our entire nation is united behind the fight against terrorism. Each of our lives has been directly affected. So there is support for spending whatever it takes and using resources we didn't know we could afford. As much as hunger troubles most of us, it rarely touches us directly. But more innocent people around the globe will die from hunger before you delete this e-mail, than died from terrorism, even through the horrors of this past year. Yet no leader has ever made eradicating hunger his or her top priority. One reason may be that it is not a likely candidate for success.

Given the prevalence of drought and hunger around the world, and also deadly conflict, Afghanistan is likely not the only place where parents have had to barter everything from their livelihoods to their children to feed themselves. It is just a place that happens to have a lot of American reporters right now to bring us such news. But the drama of the desperation almost overshadows the essential point. We shouldn't need shocking revelations to bring hunger to our attention, to prime the pump of our moral reservoirs.

Headlines are a prelude to action but hunger rarely commands them. If we have to depend on the headlines to garner the necessary attention for ending hunger we will not succeed. Notwithstanding our own exceptional affluence, the problem is too old and ubiquitous to ever be labeled news. A sustained drive to eradicate hunger will have to come not from external pressures but from inner will, not from what we're told but from what we determinedly seek out, not from what the media chooses to cover but from what we choose to dedicate our hearts.

Such a task is for only the rarest breed of men and women. It may not take physical bravery but it will take a degree of moral courage and commitment that matches anything that can be offered on the battlefield. Our hardship is to have undertaken just such a task. Our blessing is to know and work with such men and women.

Robert Kennedy, speaking in Africa once said: "Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change."

Thanks for sharing the strength of your moral courage and commitment, and for helping us change a world which yields most painfully to change.

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