Thirst and Hunger

How to imagine that kind of thirst: no rain to speak of for three years, the earth parched, the air blue but burning, dust everywhere, animals dead from lack of water strewn on the ground with their mouths agape, dreaming of drinking still although it's too late. How to imagine that kind of hunger, so long and so deep that it kills. Nothing to put into your mouth, absolutely nothing. The only thing left to do: wait for the brown barren expanse of earth to swallow you.




There's a famine in the Horn of Africa. Children are dying from malnutrition. The animals whose milk fed them have died from dehydration. Cattle and camels collapse of thirst midway between watering holes that are further and further apart. Mothers have to carry their children to hospitals, and relief stations set up by international philanthropic organizations, to be fed. Too often the mothers are too late and the children, although they have eaten, die the next day.

I'm deeply troubled to hear about people dying of hunger. It breaks me; it makes me want to pack up cans and dry goods from my pantry and fly halfway across the world. But I'm troubled too by this impulsiveness, by the lack of thought that it involves. If I force myself to think rationally, I begin to understand that providing relief to regions affected by famine reinforces a system that cannot support itself. It seems wrong to put so much energy into short-term solutions rather than long-term ones. How can these people who are suffering so much be helped in a way that will make them self-sufficient in the long run?

Some time ago I worked at a food bank, here in California. On Friday afternoons, an affable, talkative volunteer who wore a silvery blonde wig gave me a ride to the food bank (I didn't have a car then). I spent a few hours in the back room packing canned meat and fruit and vegetables, and stale baked goods donated by grocery stores, into large paper bags. I heard stories about the people for whom I was doing all this: the homeless; the single mothers with minimum-wage jobs and too many children; elderly people with insufficient pensions and families too busy or too far away to take care of them; and once a father with seven children, whose wife had left him just the night before. I didn't question that my work at the food bank was good, part of the solution to a social problem.

I'm not so sure now. Sometimes the best thing to do when people are hungry is to feed them and not think too much about the consequences. Small acts of kindness ought to be enough. But I'm rankled by this worry: that there are times when the accumulation of small acts of kindness doesn't become a large act of kindness but something much less. I'm afraid that by fulfilling the small responsibility I feel for feeding someone now, I'm relinquishing a responsibility that is much bigger, which is to make it possible for the person to feed herself.