Malnutrition

Just today at school I heard the story of one of my students yelling and crying because the lunch schedule was changed that day and he would be going to lunch later than normal. He was in the library and the librarian just fell apart. She couldn't understand why this child, a child that lives in the community we teach in, did not have anything at home to eat. He was so distraught that he had to go to lunch thirty minutes later than normal.

We have free and reduced lunch and free breakfast. However, this child has to walk to school so he doesn't make it in time for breakfast. The numbers are staggering. Every year 15 million children die of malnutrition.In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night. About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age. We need to do more as a society to reach the basic needs of our most helpless residents. I hope to help instate a weekend backpack program for students like mine. The student council will host a few canned food drives each year to build a food bank. Each weekend needy children will be sent home with an inconspicuous backpack full of nonperishable food items from the school food bank.

Food Network has partnered with Share Our Strength: No Kid Hungry to help combat childhood hunger in America. Please visit their website to learn how you can host a bake sale to raise funds to support their efforts. They work in America and keep up with world related hunger issues. Please read the latest on the Somalian hunger plague from the NY Times below:

"DROUGHTS are cyclical in Kenya. Before, they came every 10 years, but now they seem to be hitting us more often and for longer periods of time. My community remembers events and birthdays by times of hunger. We give the droughts names: “longoza” was the drought when many animals died; there was the drought of the “planes” because food was dropped from the air by planes, and one particularly bad drought was called “man who dies with money in his fist,” because, even if there was money, there was simply no food to purchase.

I was born in 1951 in Machakos. From what my mother tells me, that year there was a serious drought. My sister was born in 1961, and I clearly remember the terrible weather and the prevailing hunger throughout the region. I can’t tell you how many times I went to bed without eating. “I slept like that,” is how we described it, which means we went to bed with nothing to eat. I can’t count the number of days when “I slept like that,” or describe the feeling of going to sleep hungry knowing I’d wake up and there would still be no food for breakfast.

Hunger is an unforgivable disease because it is the easiest one to cure. It is devastating to wake up in the morning and look east, west, south and north and see that there is nothing green that you can chew. During a drought everything goes yellow and dry. I would walk the roads and search the ground to see if someone had spat out a bit of chewed-up sugar cane. I am not ashamed to say that I would re-chew what I would find.

Hunger is dehumanizing. It gets to a level where you do not know how you will survive and you will do anything for a simple kernel of corn.

The thing about drought is that it does not just affect farmers and their crops; it affects everyone. If you think about it, during harvest time farmers hire local farmhands to help with their crops. But when there are no crops to harvest, not only does the farmer lose his or her income, so do the laborers the farmer would have hired. There is a ripple effect that affects the whole community. Few have food and even fewer have money to buy food.

My parents did everything they could to feed us. My father would leave early in the morning carrying a little basket to beg for food or ask for food on credit. Each night he would return home around 10 p.m. My mother, after a fruitless day attempting to find food, would try to encourage us by telling me to keep the water in our pot boiling so that when my father arrived we could quickly cook any food he brought in the already prepared water.

I would keep the fire burning and the water boiling. As the hours passed I would watch the water level slowly go down, along with the hopes that we would eat that night. More often than not, however, my father would arrive frustrated and empty-handed. And I would sleep like that.

It is a traumatizing situation as a young child to be without food. You see the fear in the faces of your mother and father, despairing that they cannot feed their children. You feel afraid, too, because your parents can’t provide for you. Your stomach is so empty that even when you are thirsty and you take water it makes you dizzy. You get so nauseated your body wants to vomit, but you haven’t eaten. I think about this now as East Africa faces another drought. I think about all the children who are suffering as I did. We see terrible images of hunger, but I fear that we have not yet seen the worst.

We are experiencing really serious stress. At the moment, the magnitude of the hunger facing Kenya is not well known.

It is incumbent on all of us to band together and fight this very curable disease. No child on earth should ever have to sleep like that."

Written By: Peter Kimeu
He is a small-scale farmer in Machakos, Kenya, and a technical adviser for Catholic Relief Services, a humanitarian organization.
Published By: The NY Times, September 10th 2011