It is difficult to grasp, and thus care about, that many people
starving. Maybe it could help us to fathom this if we were able to
imagine one person starving, our own self perhaps. What does it feel
like to be hungry, really hungry, for many days? And many weeks? And
longer. It's easy to imagine the beginning symptoms like weakness,
shakiness, irritability, fatigue. But what happens when those aren't
remedied by food? Is it painful when the organs begin shrinking as they
do in starvation? It must be. And as the immune system loses force,
how does one endure the cramping, combined with the weakness, combined
with the lowering body temperature, combined with the overall bloating
as the body retains fluid?
Can you imagine yourself feeling that terrible? Now expand it to your
family. Your daughter. Your tiny son whose tummy is distending and who
cries with headaches. Your grandmother, coughing and scared and
silent. What would it feel like to watch a toddler, your toddler,
weaken and beg for what you can't give?
So we're not at 7.5 million people yet. We're at about 10. And already
the misery is profound and unbelievable. Now add all your closest
friends to those hungering, and you not being able to help them or be
helped by them. And you watch the gaunt stares as the body fails
because its cells haven't the nutrients they need to make the brain work
well. Add your neighbors, all of them. All of them. Are we at 100
people yet?
Millions left to go. Farther than the eyes could see, thousands upon
thousands upon thousands of weakening hungry people who want something
that exists in great abundance all over the world - food. And if hunger
and its related illnesses is bad enough and already hard to wrap your
mind around, add the other unthinkables that the Afghani families are
enduring today, right this second as you read this. No running water,
no toilets, huddled in refugee camps miles and miles long, And its
getting cold. It's going to get really, really cold and wet heavy snows
are coming. And you're so terribly hungry.
Imagine the stench and disgusting danger of raw sewage, of the
infectious diarrhea that comes from that. And there are already dead
bodies to be dragged away to be buried or burned by weak hungry men. How
does a frail starving man dig a grave for his neighbor, his friend, or
his tiny son? The nights must be endless, filled with prayers for a
warm morning sun.
And can it possibly get worse than our imaginings so far? Yes. There
are bombs dropping in the distance, and they are so loud, and the ground
shakes and you are already shivering. Those bombs are so loud and the
planes dropping them come one after another after another. And you just
wish you could have the food that that pilot will be having later. And
don't forget to add the land mines that make every step a roulette. Two
of your younger brothers stepped on them. One died after a few days of
untold pain without any medicine and the other one lost his leg just
past his knee. It's so hard for your body to heal when you can't feed
it. This gets so hard to fathom.
Please try. This is all real, and all happening right now in a place
only a plane flight away from you. What would it be like to starve?
Alouette Mayer is a 36-year-old woman who live in Columbia, Missouri and works
as a Victim Advocate at a shelter for battered women.
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