Starving

I went to Shituru as usual. I went to a lady’s house who I had seen a month before. At that time she had been very thin because she had been sick. When I saw her on Sunday she wasn’t just thin she was starving. You could tell her body was attacking itself eating away at what little muscle she had. I’ve seen it a thousand times. When she saw us she struggled with what tiny bit of energy she could muster to stand up and move inside to sit down. You could tell every movement even breathing was a challenge. She smiled at first then when we asked her what was going on in her life she could no longer hold back her tears. She cried as if it were shameful to cry trying her best to hold it back and hide her tears from our view but her grief overwhelmed her and she bawled. “Chakula inaisha. Hakuna chakula ku nyumba.” The food is finished, she said. There is no food in the house she cried. Had the story ended there I might not have written about it in my blog. This is Africa people are hungry some are even starving and I see them constantly. In fact I have always seen them.

The point is not to make you all feel guilty about throwing away food and over indulging at times nor is it to convince you to give money to the starving Africans. I think the world had its fill of the “aid porn” poured over the television during the famines in Ethiopia and war torn Sudan. I write this to explain what happened next which as you will see is also typical of Africa. I do not wish to explain this merely for your benefit to understand this culture or to give you a moving story but to explain my thought process and what I am going through at this time.

At that point her husband walked in. He was by no means fat but he was healthy. He was no where near starving. In fact I had just past him and he was eating some bread. Of course the bread had been given to him by someone else and to take it to his wife would have been rude but I think if my spouse were starving I would have just been rude. Because in fact his wife is maybe a month away from starving to death depending on what little she is able to ingest during that time. I burned with anger towards her husband. So much so that I couldn’t look at him.

In African you generally find that people have a survival mentality especially the poor. This means if you have only a small amount of food give it to the strongest person and the weaker can go without. The idea is the weaker may die anyway so cut your losses and let one person live. In less dramatic circumstances it means the husband is the bread winner so he has to remain strong in order to continue his job and bring home what little amount of money he can. I understand the mentality and the logic enough to realize it is logical. But she is starving…

A thousand thoughts run through my mind. First, how many houses have a visited that day alone that have offered me something to eat? Several. Why did no one see this woman’s pain and offered her some food? Africa the “communal society” didn’t seem very communal all of a sudden. Where was her family when she needed their help?

Then I thought if it were me months ago I would have moved out to the village. I could have built my own hut to live in on nearly free land given to me by the chief and I could have grown food. Congo doesn’t have droughts so likely they would be poor but at least not starving. I wondered why the husband who works as a street vender didn’t do something else. Why didn’t he go out and make bricks to sell? Its hard back breaking work with little profit and at times hard to find a buyer but desperate times call for desperate measures. There are thousands of ways that Congolese people create jobs even where there is seemingly no demand. Why hadn’t he done more? At that exact moment there were men working tirelessly in the river next to where we were searching for gold. Why wasn’t he out there searching? The economy is bad in the mineral driven Likasi. Jobs are few and money is hard to come by but when your wife is starving to death how can you do so little to prevent it?

Of course there are a hundred reasons why. None of my options would have been instantaneous and none of them were sure things. He already has little energy and likely wouldn’t have the strength to do much more. More than likely he had lost hope. But still I will never understand how he could justify to himself not doing more to save his wife.

So I bought her some food and I will keep buying her food because it is impossible to not help her. She is genuinely starving with no hope but the food I am giving her will save her life. I can’t save everyone but I will save her. As I hand the bag of food to her husband I pray in my head asking God to take away my burning anger for this man who would have let his wife starve to death. To him it isn’t as black and white as it is to me. To him he was behaving honorably in the only way he knew how. And God answers my prayer.

The wheels in my head refuse to stop turning. How did “we” as the whole world get to this place? A place where so many go hungry. Was it the Europeans and their colonization that caused the hunger? Was it the evil dictators their blatant theft backward economics and policies of corruption? Perhaps the war lords with their greed for wealth and power, their false promise of freedom through the loss of countless lives and millions of dollars in infrastructure? Or was it the rich nations in the world their stinginess and lack of consideration for the rest of the world or even their methods of giving so that the majority of the money is stolen by corrupt officials? Was it the UN who spends millions of dollars on expensive luxuries for their officials who sit around getting drunk pretending to talk about the world’s problems? Was it the Africans themselves and their poor work ethic, sin, witchcraft and refusal to help each other? Perhaps it was the climate the unavoidable diseases the terrain its proximity to other places hindering its ability to trade? Am I the problem possibly I do too little and too often turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to their situations? Was the situation any better 20 years ago? 50? 100? 1000? Perhaps it’s a cruel combination. Perhaps it’s something I haven’t yet thought of. Perhaps… and the wheels keep spinning in my head.

The only conclusion I have and the only hope I cling to is found in one of my favorite stories in the bible. Read 2 Kings 6. It’s a great story. The answer to starvation is not to blame God. It’s not to give up hope and live in unbelief. The answer is Philippians 4:6-7. In all things through prayer. God is mighty. He sees them he hears their cries and he is able to do exceedingly and abundantly above all we could ask or even think. In one days time he can transform even the direst of situations. Church let us pray. And please pray for me as I daily deal with these kinds of situations to not become weary or discouraged but to be a light and salt to the world I live in.