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.”

Shortly after I joined the ELCA World Hunger team, I learned a funny little saying: “Lutherans love a disaster.”  Of course, the idea behind the maxim is that Lutherans respond generously to disasters.   In the month since the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti, the saying has proved true as members of the ELCA have given more than $4.6 million to aid in the recovery. So far, more than$471 million from around the world has been sent in response to the tragedy.  The outpouring of love and concern (and tangible gifts!) is inspiring.

The tragedy unfolding in Haiti has received a lot of press (and, to a certain extent, rightfully so).  As noted by economist and poverty specialist Esther Duflo in a fabulous TED talk, every year about 9 million children under age 5 die every year.  That is equal to the death toll of the earthquake in Haiti every eight days.  Every eight days hundreds of thousands of children die from poverty.  The tragedy is that these deaths are largely preventable.

Which brings me back to the generosity of Lutherans across the United States.  In one short month, we pooled our resources and gave out of our abundance more than $4.6 million.  If we continued in our commitment to the global disaster of hunger and poverty at the same rate for the rest of the year, we would gather more than $55 million to put towards relief, development, education, and advocacy.  This would nearly triple our current financial commitment.

What decisions did you make this last month to help those suffering in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti?  Could those same decisions be made for a year?

– David Creech

This is the third post in a series considering the root causes of hunger. The Millennium Development Goals serve as a helpful framework, and this week, we’re looking at the rights of women.

Millennium Development Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

In Malawi, Albeta Chilombo deposits income from her small business into the Kasungu Community Savings and Credit Cooperative, a bank supported by ELCA World Hunger.

The inequality women have faced throughout history is well known. What may be less well known is how much a society benefits when women share equal status and rights with men. Here are a few statistics from The Girl Effect website: 

• “When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has .2 fewer children.”
• “When girls and women can earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families, as compared to only 30 to 40 percent for men.” 
• “An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ future wages by 10 to 20 percent.”
• “An extra year of secondary school boosts girls’ future wages by 15 to 25 percent.”

This means that as educated girls grow up to lead productive and successful lives, every one around them tends to benefit from their success. They raise healthier and better educated children, enhancing the opportunities for future generations. In addition, educated women, if given the opportunity, are better able to participate in the workforce. This means both income for themselves AND increasing a country’s capacity for economic growth and poverty reduction. Ensuring access to education for girls and women is a critical first step toward empowering them, their children, and their communities.

Traditional laws related to property and assets also create impediments for women. Despite the fact that in many countries women are responsible for the majority of agricultural labor and household management, they often own none of the land, buildings, or businesses, and may have very little to say about how household assets are used. What’s more, they often have no ability to obtain credit. As a result, should they become widowed or abandoned by their husbands, women can be left with no money, no house, no land, and no way of growing food. Worse still, they may be ostracized by their communities, leaving them with no where to go. Yet they frequently retain responsibility for feeding and caring for their children. In such cases, women and their children have little hope of escaping poverty and hunger. Until women achieve the ability and right to support themselves, hunger and poverty are likely to persist.

-Nancy Michaelis

Six months ago I got rid of most of my worldly goods, sold my house, put things in storage, left my ELCA job, and commenced a simple living-style midlife sabbatical. Since then I’ve been a guest, not a resident, in more than 30 places, privy to an intimate view of how we live and consume today.

When I had a home address, simplifying and greening my life was about building a system of regular habits: recycling, public transit, car sharing, community-supported agriculture, resale shopping, expense tracking, green cleaning practices, line drying, etc. My everyday system has vanished. As a guest, I participate as gracefully and gratefully as possible (I don’t always succeed) in the systems around me. Here’s what I’ve noticed.

Too much stuff.

It’s a mess out there. Almost everyone lives in confusion and clutter. The households you could call “spare” belong to retired people (raised under in less materialistic times), former Holden Village long-term staffers (veterans of life in the wilderness) and former ELCA missionaries (like me, visitors to planet consumer, due to their cross-cultural, outside-the-US experiences).

Everyone else, especially those with kids still at home, is too overwhelmed with obligations to bring any kind of order to rooms full of toys and furniture and knick-knacks and sports equipment and coats and shoes and books and televisions and laptops and CDs and DVDs and computers and toys.

My Christmas present to my siblings with families was a day of deep cleaning, of tackling big problems they had not time for. Because I love cleaning with the stereo up loud, I had fun, and my work was significant and appreciated…but hardly made a dent.

If everyone in the US had a garage sale at the same time, would it be like a run on the bank? Would everything suddenly be valueless, so we could somehow stop the flow of stuff from Stuff Central, wherever that is?

Perhaps, like that drawing in The Little Prince of the boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant, we have a hump stuck in us, and after we digest, recycle, or landfill it, we will get over having to own everything someone tells us to buy, and we can go on to valuing ideas, services, art, music, skills—“things” that are non-material and ask only for space in our hearts and minds.

But hospitality still rules.

Last summer a former ELCA missionary told me that her family noticed, after they came back from 6 years in Tanzania, that nobody invited them home for dinner anymore. All they got were invitations to go out for coffee. After the intense hospitality of Arusha, they were very lonely indeed.

Are we afraid to invite people into our messes, or too worried about time to turn an hour of coffee into a full evening? Somehow my status as relative or very old friend has gotten me around the “let’s meet for coffee” barrier, because I’ve discovered that no matter what the mess, people do still cook, bake, and linger around the table in private. Is there something we can do to open up our homes, and put dinner invitations back at the top of our social lives?

Too many cars.

In the face of nearly universal car ownership, I keep slogging away at getting from point A to point B without one. Portland, Oregon, makes it easy. And if you’ve got three hours, it’s possible to cover the 75 miles between the Seattle airport and my family’s farm in Mt. Vernon on public transportation. In Sacramento, I bike a lot.

When I need a car, I try to be creative. Without a fixed address, I can’t participate in a formal car sharing program, so I share informally by using or renting my siblings’ cars when they are not using them. (I like to think of this as using excess capacity.) I got to Berkeley today by emailing friends and siblings to see if they or anyone they knew had to be in the Bay Area for meetings or work this week. A college friend dropped me here on his way to San Francisco this morning, and my sister will drive me back to Sacramento after a board meeting here tomorrow. I could have taken Amtrak, but using social media—the online equivalent of the ride boards we used to depend on in the 70s—to make a car pool saved me $48 and is giving me three hours of conversation with two dear people.

But where are the others who are thinking this way? Car pooling, public transportation, bicycling and walking—even one or two days a week!—get little more than lip service from drivers. Drivers just keep…driving.

Deciding to live simply and sustainably is harder in a family.

Brushing my teeth in other homes has shown me that simplifying my own life was a piece of cake. As a single parent, I could make and enforce the big lifestyle decisions. And I wouldn’t be on this west coast sofa tour if I weren’t already an empty nester. People in couples and people with children at home don’t get to act unilaterally. More compromise is involved. This has been humbling.

Living simply on the road can make you feel needy.

Could I borrow your car this morning if I take you to work buy you some gas? Can we drive to Berkeley together? Since you’re dropping your daughter off at her job at the mall, could I run into that REI store, so I don’t have to figure out how to get there on the bus? Is there a library with wireless somewhere near by? Could I do a load of wash this morning? Sure, if you really don’t need that GoreTex raincoat, I’ll be glad to use it.

Living simply on the road can make you feel resourceful.

Of course I can show you how to get from your place to the airport on public transit. Have a slice of the pie I just baked you. The Greyhound gets in at 3:00 pm so we can meet at 4:00. Here, let me pick up the lunch tab/buy the concert tickets/get those groceries. Check out the kitchen cabinets I washed and organized for you!

If you’re a web designer, could you please build my dream web site?

In the last two weeks I flew from Sacramento to Seattle to Portland to Sacramento, all on Alaska Air. I need a web site that lets me mix and match modes of transportation, so I could book a flight to Seattle, a train or bus to Portland (because for trips under 500 miles, it’s “greener” to use ground transportation), and then the Portland to Seattle flight. If I can’t book it all at once, could the site please recommend ALL the options for traveling between cities before I default to the most common and most highly advertised alternative? If you build it, I will come, and tell everybody else about it. The only thing close is hopstop.com, which offers bus & subway directions for 12 cities plus all of metropolitan New York/New Jersey. This has already been named a “top startup” by some Internet rating agency. I’ll bet my idea would find many fans.

Next stop, Latin America

A sabbatical is freeing but not free. Travel expenses have replaced mortgage, utilities, and grocery bills. Next week, my visits to planet consumer take a dramatic turn as I go off to Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala and Suriname for the next three months. I’ll get to visit Lutherans all along the way (more sofas!), and will post whenever possible. Thank you for traveling with me this far.

Anne Basye

Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

This week’s post will be a collection of thoughts I’ve been having about the still unfolding tragedy in Haiti.  As you may guess, I have been watching the news and the Web with particular interest as the situation has developed.

By now we are all familiar with the country–how it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, how it shares the island of Hispaniola with it relatively wealthier neighbor, the Dominican Republic, and how that the disparity between the two countries is at least in part the result of U.S. policies (for a great informative piece on the history of Haiti, click here).   The earthquake was especially devastating because of the extreme poverty and its proximity to the main population center.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, we have seen many things that demonstrate the difficulty in providing effective aid.  The total loss of infrastructure has made it difficult to deliver aid in the first place.  We have seen people trying to work around the infrastructure, like the (well-meaning, I hope) Baptist missionaries trying to smuggle non-orphaned kids to the Dominican Republic.  This has now decreased the effectiveness of other agencies doing legitimately good work (such as the private air lifts that previously took 15 critically injured children a day to hospitals in the United States to receive treatment–since the arrest of the missionaries, they have taken three children total, leading to the death or permanent injury of at least 10 children).  There was also the debate about who would pay for the treatment of the critically wounded coming to Florida hospitals that led to a halt to airlifts.  (As an aside, this was for me one of the real tragic stories in the whole affair–we have the means to provide immediate aid, but we are worried about costs.  I recognize that nothing is free, and that Florida does have other financial obligations, but it just felt wrong to put money ahead of lives.  Your thoughts?)

To close this post, looking ahead, we need to make sure we maintain our commitment to the people of Haiti.  There have been rumblings of forgiving Haiti’s debt and I, for one, think this would be a good thing to continue to advocate for.  Our continued financial support can do much good, especially since many of our partners work very close to the ground.  As to the desire to go down to Haiti, which I find myself fighting, unless you have a particular skill to offer, it is much better to pray and advocate and give.  Haiti lost a lot of its skilled labor force (they were the ones inside the buildings–the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers–when the earthquake struck), and now has many unemployed, unskilled hands that need work and the money that comes from work.  We should be very slow to take that away from them in our desire be a part of the action.

-David Creech

On Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, a man lingered on a street corner, examining a trash bin for items worthy of rescue.  He wore long sleeves and slacks—items that had seen their better days—even though the June air approached 75 degrees.  While pondering whether or not to approach him, give him a few bucks, or just walk by, I studied his face.  An unexpected peace emanated from his eyes.  Not a frantic or dejected survival instinct—no, that was not what was at work.  Clearly something unusual guided this man’s approach to the work of the moment.

I forgot about this man within a few minutes, days (for sure), and after a week I doubt I thought about that encounter.  A few weeks later, I walked the streets of St. Louis during the ELCA Youth Gathering.  One night, I saw the same man doing the same thing on a street corner not unlike the one where I’d met him in Chicago.  I confronted him, unable to determine how this was possible.  Was he the most ambitious traveling homeless man in the country?  Did he migrate from big city to big city when he’d seen all he cared to see?

“I saw you in Chicago a few weeks ago,” I said.

“No, sir.  You must be mistaken,” he replied.

“No, I’m sure I’m not,” I said.  There was no mistake.  “It was definitely you.  Downtown Chicago.”

The man studied my face, a slight grin on his face though his eyes conveyed utter surprise.  That evening, he was wearing a cap.  He removed it and motioned down his body as if to say ‘have a good look.’  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, smiling.  “Have a good night.”

I didn’t offer to help the man that night, just as I hadn’t a few weeks before.  It wasn’t my place.  Something much bigger was at work, something I only understood weeks or even months later.

I don’t recall when I have felt a stronger presence of God on earth, embodied in a man who carried his cross with no shame, sleeping wherever he probably could, living by the grace of God.  But that’s just the thing.  One can believe it was an ordinary man, and that built on my certainty that the two were not look-alikes, this homeless man happened to garner a way to St. Louis from Chicago.  Not only that, but I happened to encounter him of all people in both cities, weeks apart.

When we’re called to act, we must act.  But why is it that those in a position to offer help assume that is what is needed?  I realized only later that the reason I didn’t offer to help the man was that he was not the one who needed something.

I was.

-Aaron Cooper is Writer-Editor for ELCA World Hunger

As I was pondering this week’s post I got excited thinking about the fact that today was Groundhog Day (I’m not so excited that Mr. P. Phil saw his shadow, though…).  I was excited to talk about the clichéd definition of insanity–doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.  As I gleefully plotted the post I realized that Groundhog Day historically had nothing to do with doing the same thing over and over.  This idea was introduced in a 1993 film starring Bill Murray, with the apt, though perhaps uncreative, title, Groundhog Day.  I marveled at the notion that my precognitive connection, my free association, was something entirely unrelated to the original understanding of the day.  Even more amazing, my first understanding of Groundhog Day (having to do with the length of winter) was something that had been learned then supplanted.  And I’m not alone with this shift in thinking.

So what does this have to do with hunger?  A lot, I think.  For one, much has been made by folks like Nick Kristof and Peter Singer about the intuitive joy we feel when we help someone (a good thing!), especially when our help (e.g., filling a bag of food or serving someone a meal) or the person (e.g., sponsoring a child or giving to a specific project) is tangible and the need is immediate.  While this probably has some evolutionary benefits–human beings are social creatures after all–attending only to immediate needs does not help us in the long term goal of eliminating hunger and poverty.  It could even be detrimental.  Take, for example, the situation in Haiti.  As noted in the ELCA Disaster Response report on Haiti, “With the huge influx of humanitarian aid coming into the country, a negative impact is being realized by business owners.”  The report goes on to explain some of the complexities of the situation, but the point is still the same.  (To be clear, both immediate relief and long term development are needed, and both are integral to ELCA World Hunger’s approach to dealing with hunger and poverty, domestically and internationally.)  In short, maybe our first impulse, our precognitive response, needs to be tempered.  That intuitive joy we may feel by doing something tangible and immediate is good, but maybe we need to also find joy in the long term, and perhaps less glamorous, work of working with and on behalf of those who are vulnerable.

-David Creech