This is the fifth post in a series considering the root causes of hunger. The Millennium Development Goals serve as a helpful framework.

Millennium Development Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and other diseases

Are you familiar with guinea worm disease? It’s a parasitic worm that people get by drinking contaminated water. Here’s what happens to someone who has ingested guinea worm larva. The larva penetrates the stomach walls and grows into a worm as it moves about the body. After about a year, the person gets a painful blister that turns into an open sore. It can happen anywhere on the body, but is often on the legs. The sore can be accompanied by itching, burning, swelling, and fever. Then a full grown worm begins coming out of the sore. It can be up to 3 feet long (!!) and can emerge as little as an inch a day. It is painful and can take weeks to be rid of the whole thing. One of the only ways to relieve the pain (without pain medication, unavailable to many of the afflicted) is to soak the wound in water. This allows the worm to release more larva into the water supply and continue the cycle.

Oh. And you can have more than one worm emerging from different parts of your body at the same time.

I ask: how well would you be able to work or learn during the weeks or months it takes to get the worm(s) out? Would you be able to concentrate? Hold a job? Exercise? Cook meals? Care for your children? At best, a person’s productivity is slowed. At worst, the person is completely debilitated. And if you can’t work, you don’t make money or tend your garden or care for your family. If you can’t learn, you reduce your chances of getting the knowledge you need for a bright future. If a disease like this is afflicting several family or community members at the same time and serially, it can stunt a whole town.

According to the World Health Organization, there were some 50 million cases of guinea worm disease worldwide as recently as the 1950’s. Today, due to a major effort by the international community and affected countries to combat it, the number is under 100,000.  Tremendous progress, but this is just one disease, and many others take a similar toll on the ability of people to make a living, secure food, and end hunger.  What’s more, diseases like guinea worm, malaria, and HIV and AIDS affect the young, most productive workers in a community. In the case of AIDS, not only does productivity slow, but people in their prime working years die, leaving not only a weakened community, but orphans who need support from that community.

In places where people are already hungry and weakened, in places where they must expend inordinate time and energy just to stay alive, in places with minimal access to health care, disease can be the final blow. Helping people maintain their health is a critical component to ending hunger.

-Nancy Michaelis

As I was thinking of what to blog about this week the idea that came to mind was exercise. The problem was, although an avid exerciser myself (though I have no illusions of being any sort of expert in the field), it almost seemed counterintuitive to write about burning calories on a hunger blog. So why is it that I can’t seem to shake the idea? Here’s my attempt at that answer:

When I think of ELCA World Hunger I don’t just think of our projects which help people to grow and attain the food they need to survive. I don’t just think about water collection systems and domestic hunger grants. In fact, I don’t always think about food! That’s because I also think about advocacy, education, simplicity and sustainability. I know that these are often based on food and water issues, but ultimately our concern is the good health of God’s people, and that includes you and me. Last summer as an intern I learned a lot about domestic obesity and food quality. I also followed the map in our office as the Tour de Revs bicycled across the United States raising awareness for hunger, poverty and wellness issues. Overall, I discovered that ELCA World Hunger isn’t just trying to feed people in the literal sense, “feeding” is also figurative. People need spiritual, mental, emotional and movement food as well. Movement food? Don’t worry this isn’t a term you should know, or one that I have ever even heard someone use, I made it up. What I am referring to is our God-given gift of movement. While we all have different ability levels many of us enjoy running, jumping, walking, climbing, crawling and every other form of movement you can think of. It is my experience that there is something very fulfilling about movement; for me, exercise can even have a spiritual impact. Sometimes, however, movement food can double as emotional food. Remember back when you played double-dutch at recess? Games can also provide the fruits of laughter, social interaction and fun.

Exercise can also be simple and sustainable. You don’t need much to jump rope, go for a run or walk your dog. Snowball fights and hourlong games of freeze tag only require imagination and weather cooperation. In my experience these simple activities can help to sustain both good health and big smiles.

It’s also a lesson, because when we value movement food we teach others through our actions. Exercise, drinking clean water and eating nutritious foods are all powerful ways to practice good health and to thank God for the gift of our bodies.

~Lana

This week is the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS.  According to the Web site,

The National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS is the coming together of all people of faith to unite with purpose, compassion and hope. Through the power of God’s love we will educate every American about HIV prevention facts; encourage and support HIV testing; advocate for the availability of compassionate care and treatment for all those living with the disease in every community in America; and love unconditionally all persons living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.

ELCA World Hunger has many reasons to be engaged in HIV and AIDS work.  AIDS and hunger are closely intertwined.  AIDS is rapidly spreading in the most impoverished areas of the world (including the poorest areas of the United States)—places where education, women’s and children’s rights, and peace are hard to come by.  Many areas, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the symptoms of poverty facilitate the spread of the disease while the lives and productivity lost to the pandemic further impoverish vulnerable communities.  Moreover, AIDS is especially devastating to hungry persons.  Malnourished persons cannot take anti-retroviral drugs—an empty stomach cannot handle the powerful medicine.  In the absence of drugs and adequate nutrition, HIV develops into AIDS more quickly.  Once a person has AIDS, more food is needed to fight the illness and counteract weight loss.

Join us this week in prayer and advocacy with and on behalf of those living with HIV and AIDS.  To learn more about the ELCA’s engagement in the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, click here.

-David Creech

“Cuba did not go the way of possessions,” says the Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer in the lovely movie, “The Buena Vista Social Club.”

Last month I experienced the possession-less path on a visit to the Lutheran Church in Cuba. I’m not pro- or anti-Castro, but as a Lutheran with serious questions about U.S. consumer culture, I found it refreshing to step COMPLETELY outside it.

Our first few days were spent on the Isla de la Juventud, an island off the southern coast where the Cuban Lutheran Church is based. (Click here to read the island’s history.) On this rural island, time seemed to have stood still. With few private cars, people moved about on foot, on bicycles, in bicycle taxis, in trucks converted to buses, and even by horse and buggy. When the roosters stopped crowing and the hour for turning down the ever-throbbing reggaeton music arrived, it was amazingly quiet. The din of traffic we are accustomed to was absent.

Also absent were television commercials. Movies ran without interruption. Newscasts lasted 45 minutes. Of course, the movies and the music videos being shown were themselves a kind of commercial for the way of possessions, but never once was anyone exhorted to buy a product. Public health announcements and promotions for cultural events ran instead.

The home I stayed in had everything but clutter. My hostess had enough glasses, plates, and silverware for everyone present, but no more. When I shivered under a sheet during an unseasonably cold night, she produced a second sheet and a blanket.

Isla de la Juventud gave me a glimpse into life organized around something besides stuff. Now, it wasn’t Eden, and most people I met were actually trying to get MORE stuff. One man said that Cuba does $650 million in business with the U.S., but because of the embargo, the goods arrive chopped up in the  suitcases of returning relatives and residents. The Havana charter area of Miami Airport was teeming with televisions, radios, and microwaves wrapped in blue plastic to protect them on their flight. My fellow travelers from the ELCA Florida-Bahamas Synod, the companion synod to the Cuban Lutheran Church, said that on their last trip they had seen a bumper, a muffler, a car door, and a windshield wrapped for the journey.

It’s not easy to move around on the island, and we were frequently hungry. 9 hours might pass between our breakfast and our return to the church for our communal supper. That obese or even overweight people were few and far between was evidence that you can’t just drive up to a store or a restaurant for a snack.  The consumption of milk and meat are restricted for most people, and it can be hard to secure food and building materials. That was clear in Havana, which has more cars and restaurants and stores and tourists,  but is teeming with beautiful buildings that are falling apart.

My book Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal asks the question, “what is enough?” Most Americans passed “enough” decades ago. I’m convinced we are entering a time in which we will happily and willingly scale back our “enough”, for the sake of our physical, emotional, and planetary health.

In Cuba, the answer to “what is enough?” is “this is too little.” And although Cuba’s way of few possessions has been imposed, I know, from the top, in its stark mirror it’s possible to see our own excesses clearly.

90 miles from Miami, and no television commercials. ¡Imaginelo!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

What does one billion mean to you?  It’s that next level, the powerful tier above a million that gets our attention.  On the heels of the Academy Awards, the movie “Avatar” has made more than 2.5 billion dollars worldwide—and it’s not done yet.  Ted Turner bestowed a billion-dollar gift on the United Nations a few years back.  We know about the Gates Foundation.  And in the news lately, Tiger Woods has been dubbed the only athlete ever to reach that mark in earnings.  But then there’s the stark reality we learned about in 2009 that the number of people who are chronically hungry in the world has reached one billion.

One billion.  Where do I start?  How can I make a difference?

If you’re like me, you have asked yourself these questions.  It’s a mind-numbing number, one that can make making a difference seem futile.

But we’re the church.  We don’t get to make that decision for ourselves.  We are called to act.  We are called to reach out to our neighbor.  Not acting is not an option.

So if you find that number so incomprehensible that it almost makes you not want to try, set it aside.  I’m not suggesting you ignore the reality of the global picture of hunger but just keep it in perspective.  Lead with your gut for a moment.  Is it okay that thousands and millions and even one billion people are chronically hungry?  Is it okay that one person in your community is sleeping on the streets or walking around without knowing where that next meal will come from? 

If you’ve ever been intensely hungry and you had to wait an hour or two to eat, recall those hunger rumblings and allow that to take over your gut.  It’s that gut reaction that has the potential to circumvent numbers that almost seem made up.  It’s your gut that in a moment of cerebral paralysis can kick into overdrive that instinct, that compassion that has compelled you to read this blog and care about doing something about it.

Follow your gut.

They are cardboard, small and round. We all have them, often in multiple rooms of our home, and all too often…they stack up in our garbage bins. What are they? Toilet paper tubes! As silly as it may seem my pet peeve is having nowhere in the restroom to put a used up toilet paper roll’s tube (except the trash) when it’s ready to be switched out and prime for reusing or recycling. Last week I finally put an extra receptacle in my bathroom to collect these tubes in one place. Now they are prime for recycling! Today I also found some great ideas for how to reuse toilet paper tubes from the World Environmental Organization and The Green Parent’s websites.

Here are my favorites:

• Use in place of a peat pot. Fill with potting soil, place in a plastic butter/ice cream tub, plant the seed and water. When the plant sprouts, plant the seedling (tube and all) in the ground. The tube rots away.
• Stuff an extra set of stockings into a tube and keep in your desk drawer at work, your glove compartment, etc. in case of a run.
• Stuff a few plastic bags into the tube and then place the tube in the glove compartment of your car. It will keep them tidy and on-hand for when you need them.
• Use for storing long pieces of ribbon which have been saved from packages. This will keep the ribbon smooth.
• Donate old toilet paper or paper towel tubes to your local school or library to use as craft projects.

So whether you reuse your toilet paper tubes for gardening or ribbons, or you recycle them straight away, thanks for keeping them out of the trash!

Engaging in social media can be dangerous.  Between my Twitter account (you can follow me and my friends @hungerbites), our social networking site (join us on The Table), and various blogs, I find myself conflicted… perhaps a friend from the blogosphere can help.

It started when my friend Mark posed a question on The Table.  He wrote:

“Organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfamand so many others are focusing on the same [hunger and poverty] issues, and with the leading of people like Jeffrey Sachs and Esther Duflo, and major think tanks like those atYale, Columbia and MIT and so many others also working on these issues, plus Protestant and Catholic Christians involved, why has so little progress been made?”

The upshot of his question is, why, if we can all agree that hunger and poverty are evils, and if we have put so much intellectual energy into addressing them, have we not made the progress we need?  Why are hunger and poverty a perennial problem?

Bill Easterly points to one problem–too often the self interests of a given NGO (or even a division within the same NGO!) take the place of the needs of those they are supposedly in the business of supporting.  He offers the example of the health care aid that is given to Ethiopia.  Citing Owen Barder,

“According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), in Ethiopia about 65% of the population (52 million people) live in areas at risk of malaria. Malaria is the leading cause of health problems, responsible for about 27% of deaths; and malaria epidemics are increasing. TheHIV/AIDS prevalence rate among adults is 2.1% (2007) – that’s about 1.6 million people living with HIV.

“Of $5.15 per head provided in aid for health to Ethiopia in 2007, about $3.18 per head was earmarked for HIV  while about $0.26 cents per head was allocated to malaria control.  Given the relatively low burden of HIV, earmarking 60% of health aid for HIV is excessive relative to other needs for health spending.

“Of course it is right that we should try to make sure that everybody with HIV has access to medicines to keep them healthy, and … to prevent spread of the disease. But we should also make sure that people have bednets and drugs to stop malaria, provide childhood vaccination to prevent easily preventable diseases, ensure access to contraception and safe abortions, and, above all, enough funding to provide basic health services that would save thousands of lives and suffering.  Yet we are not willing to provide enough money to do all of this.  It is in this context that it is damaging to earmark 60% of health aid to HIV.”

This for me raises the important question of how we accompany those who are poor and vulnerable.  How do we seek their interests rather than our own?  How do we truly work with and on behalf of those who are marginalized?  Working for a non-profit agency myself, it means I have to constantly watch my motivations for a given strategy or initiative or program.  (I found a blog recently that speaks directly to this issue. They pose as a real aid agency with the tag line “A charitable organization committed to working anywhere where generalized poverty and misery will ensure significant levels of comfort for our staff.”  The satire is biting, but the point is well made.)

We have to be honest about who benefits from our decisions.  And I think this translates into everyday life as well.  Who benefits from the decisions I make regarding consumption?  Who benefits from a given policy or politician I support?  And so on…

All of this points to a larger problem with human ability to empathize and seek the good of another.  But that is a question too big for this post. Until I have the courage to address it, maybe you can provide me with your thoughts on the subject.

-David Creech

This is the fourth post in a series considering the root causes of hunger. The Millennium Development Goals serve as a helpful framework.

Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5: Reduce Child Mortality; Improve Maternal Health

Hunger, maternal health, and child mortality form a vicious cycle. Bread for the World’s Frontline Issues in Nutrition Assistance: Hunger Report 2006 (Chapter 3, pg. 77) offers an illustration: A hungry woman is malnourished and lacks good health care. She hasn’t had enough to eat for a long time and is underweight. Now she becomes pregnant. Lacking sufficient food for herself, let alone a baby, she does not gain enough weight or take in enough nutrients for a healthy pregnancy. Between the demands of a growing fetus, insufficient health care, and hunger, her health is further strained. In a state of such physical weakness, her risk of dying during childbirth increases. If she survives, breastfeeding and caring for a baby will make further demands of her body and energy, requiring more food than usual – food that she still doesn’t have.

In the meantime, her baby, lacking adequate nutrition in the womb, is born weighing less than he should. He has a tough start to life. His immune system is weak, so he’s likely to get sick and may not make it to his fifth birthday. If he survives, his physical and mental development may be slowed or even impaired without adequate amounts of milk and food. Without adequately nutrition, as he grows into adolescence and adulthood, he is smaller, weaker, more susceptible to illness, and less productive than he would have been otherwise. This makes it more difficult to maintain employment and secure enough to eat. It is difficult to break out of the cycle of poverty. In the case of a baby girl, the cycle repeats itself with each pregnancy. Sadly, poor maternal health is both a cause and effect of hunger.

On the hopeful side, it is a cycle, which means it can be interrupted. Or even transformed. Appropriate food intake can turn the process from a viscious cycle into a virtuous one. With enough to eat, women are stronger, more able to meet the requirement of pregnancy, and more able to secure food and resources for themselves and their children. Their babies are born healthier, stonger, and more resistant to illness. With properly fueled development, these children grow into fully productive adults, increasing their capacity to maintain employment and feed their own families. Providing food can reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, and eventually, reduce hunger.

-Nancy Michaelis

The following was written by guest author Wesley Menke

———–

I am a youth minister. I am also passionate about issues of world hunger. My greatest hope—vocationally—is to bring these two worlds together. I hope to be a part of empowering a generation of young people to actively live out their faith by ending world hunger. The youth of our church have learned how to serve in New Orleans, they’ve learned how to give at the Souper Bowl of Caring offering, but I wonder if they have learned how to have a prophetic voice.

On January 19 I stood on the Mexican side of the US/Mexico border at the edge of the Pacific. Have you ever seen a 30 foot tall wall run into the ocean? It is bizarre. On this fence hang thousands of small white crosses connected by rope. Each cross represents someone who has died trying to cross the border. This day the wind was blowing and it was stormy. As I walked along the fence I heard the crosses rattling against each other and thumping against the metal fence. This rattling sound reminded me of Ezekiel, a prophet of the Hebrew Bible. God told Ezekiel to prophesy to a valley of dry bones, and Ezekiel responded: “So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone” (Ezekiel 37:7). Then, flesh covers the bones, and eventually the breath of life fills the people.

Many migrants who cross the border die of starvation. But migrants try to cross the border because they are starving to begin with. The result is a valley of dry bones.

God is calling for prophets like Ezekiel. In addition to teaching young people how to give and to serve—two essential traits of Christianity—let’s teach them how to speak prophetically. And like all things the best way to teach is by leading through example.

I discovered more of my own prophetic voice when I visited the border fence during the four days I spent in Mexico in January of this year. I attended the conference, “Developing Hearts that Yearn for Justice” a bi-annual ecumenical and theological conference that takes place in San Diego and Tijuana. I’d like to say thank you to ELCA World Hunger and Transformational World Opportunities for the opportunity to attend.

Wesley Menke is a youth minister at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in San Clemente, CA and first year seminarian seeking ordination in the ELCA.

The hungry.  Hungry people. 

If you examine the structure of either of these references, you’ll notice that the primary emphasis is on the condition of being hungry.  In the case of the hungry, the word “people” isn’t even in the realm of consciousness.  “The hungry” serves as a defense mechanism, a way to categorize something that is undesirable and put it on a shelf at a safe distance so that we don’t have to feel a personal connection.  “The hungry” are simply out there…somewhere.  Nameless, faceless, and seemingly not even human or at least not deserving enough of a human reference. 

Photo by Paul Jeffrey/ACT International

Hungry people.  On the scale of objectification, this is better.  At least we are talking about people here, though again the emphasis is not on people but rather the condition of being hungry.  People comes last, and so psychologically our emphasis is still on fixing a condition rather than serving someone just like us—same age, same gender, same station in life relatively speaking—who happened to be born in a community or country where there are extremely limited resources. 

Let’s see if we can do better.  Okay, here’s one more attempt: 

People who are hungry.  Simply put, people come first.  We’re not trying to help feed a nameless breed of beings known as “the hungry” (akin to “the infected”).  We’re not trying to serve our neighbors, the “hungry people”—still defined by their condition rather than their self-identity as human beings.  Rather, we are ministering to people—people who happen to be hungry but are people first nonetheless.  They are Kennedy Symphorian, a skinny 15-year-old boy I met years ago in Tanzania who had HIV and whose non-traditional family eeked out a meager living and survived on assistance from an organization that received support from ELCA World Hunger dollars.  They are the children begging for handouts on the streets of Nicaragua, some of whom work the streets alone during the day while their parent(s) crowd into a tightly packed school bus and ride off to work in a sweatshop.  They are nameless strangers we meet on our streets who browse trash cans for food scraps, approach our rolled-up windows at a stoplight (maybe we look at them, maybe not), sleep on a doorstep in 15-degree weather.  They are us only with fewer resources and a harder way, trying to survive. 

We cannot afford to talk about people in any way less than the dignified manner all souls should be afforded.  We are all people first and foremost.  We are Christians, Muslims, writers, janitors, men, women, fast-food workers, nurses, crossing guards, students, tailors…we are who we are, defined by our humanity and our relationship to God. 

Let’s put people first instead of resorting to comfortable, overused phrases that define people by their condition.  Maybe next time you encounter “the other”—that perfect stranger who asks you for money because she probably really needs it—you’ll ask her name and be able to talk about the time you met Rhonda rather than “some homeless woman.”