Write for God

I start my mornings with our local daily in a methodical way. News first, then lifestyle sections and finally comics and puzzles. Yesterday, that meant that I had two opportunities to be offended by the poverty of both the body and spirit in our world.

The headline in the world news section put it plainly: Survival on dirt cookies. The subhead was what really caught my eye, though:  Rising costs take food out of mouths in Haiti, where most people live on less than $2 a day.  

People on our hemisphere, within distance of cruise ships ferrying vast quantities of midnight buffet dishes for passengers to eat after a day of gorging, are resorting to eating dirt mixed with salt and a little shortening to ease their hunger pangs. Dirt.

With food prices rising, Haity’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

They are eating dirt.

The photos accompanying the online text showed a scrawny 11-year-old sticking out his tongue to show the clay color from the cookie he had eaten. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingers, wrote the reporter. Dirt.

A college newspaper in the Tampa Bay area ran an editorial this week mentioning the death of actor Heath Ledger. The students wondered why there was so much coverage of the passing of a movie star, but not of the 100,000 children who died of malnutrition around the world that week and every week. In a world where hunger kills, we don’t have to far to find demeaning poverty. According to Feed the Children, 12 million kids in America will go to bed hungry tonight.

While I was working in county government, I used to write news releases for a government program that provided breakfasts and lunches to children during the summer. Not all children, of course, just the ones getting free or reduced lunches because their caregivers weren’t making enough to feed them properly. One of the social workers used to tell me that, without the summer food program, children in my large Florida county–site of million-dollar-condos on the beach and malls with jewelry stores galore–wouldn’t get enough to eat if school wasn’t in session.

Children in Haiti eating dirt and children in America having to rely on federally-funded meal programs to get enough to eat during the summer. Here is what Mother Teresa so aptly called our poverty of spirit. In the midst of plans for Super Bowl XLII parties and the restaurant reviews in food sections that pooh-pooh eateries for a slightly soggy appetizer, we have children and adults who don’t have the most basic access to nutrition. We are indeed spiritually poor when, as Gandhi said, we are not the change we want to see in the world.

Feed the Children, Food for the Poor, Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services. Pick one and make a donation that can ease the hunger pangs of children who might be eating dirt tonight. I sometimes make small donations to the Christian Appalachian Project that provides relief in one of the most deprived regions of our nation. They perform a valuable service to Americans who are so often forgotten when we think of dire poverty.

I went to bed last night wondering why people in any part of the world have to resort to eating dirt to fill their stomachs, but especially in a country so near to this nation of plenty. What really nauseated me after reading about the Haitian diet was the cutesy item in the food section’s recipes that provided various ways to make Mississippi Mud Pie, a fatty, totally decadent dessert made with chocolate.

In the same newspaper, well-fed readers are debating the best ingredients for a trifle that winks at being called a mud pie and a reporter is writing about malnourished people resorting to really eating mud cookies to kill the pain of hunger.

It makes you wonder which nation is really the poorest, as least when it comes to its collective soul.