Compassion and the Hungry Child

CATEGORY:13-17

Photographs

A photograph speaks one-thousand words.

But my pictures sing, in tired, far-away voices. They line the walls of my room, and the whispers of little children hush me to sleep. The photos are graced with the tilting silhouettes of children, children who hobble like the towering Pisa of Italy—falling sideways from hunger. This morning I received another package from my mother, and it felt leathery and weather-worn from all the rough handling. My mother is a photojournalist.

The yellow tape peels off easily and a tightly-bound wad of photographs falls into my lap. Her pictures depict landscapes of destruction and waste. There are photographs of buildings in ruins. There are photographs of culture in ruins. But most importantly, there are photographs of human ruins. Grandmothers with Mother Theresa eyes, pupils traced delicately in a cat’s yellow, gape at me under a waterfall of wrinkles. So many pictures of broken mothers, clutching their litters of children, leave me to wonder where are all the fathers? But in times of war, a daddy is an unknown luxury.

The pictures that hang on my wall, though, are the ones of children. The children are like the stick and ball models I assemble in Chemistry class. There is nothing padding their bones. Their skin stretches for miles. I can see their hummingbird hearts thrash against their fragile rib cages. I imagine smuggling them all into my apartment. They could have my bed, they could sleep in the bath tub, they could sleep on the kitchen table and on the sofa. In the morning, bushy-eyed and hungry, they would wake up to the smell of banana pancakes. I would whisk them off to nursery-school. I want to give them everything in the world.

Unfortunately, the very children that haunt my dreams will most likely never know the satisfaction of a warm meal, the nurture of a loving hand, the opportunity that comes with education. Instead, the only feeling that these babies are acquainted with is hunger. Real hunger. Endless, insatiable hunger. The mouths of these little children are cavernous, they could eat up the whole world and still feel hungry. My mother, in a distant voice, tells me how their bones are stunted in growth, how malnutrition paints their skin a rainbow-myriad of colors.

I trace the outline of a little boy’s jutting ribs. On the back of this particular photo, my mother has sketched a brief story about Abdul Samed. He and his twin sister had shared everything. From the womb to their last night together, they were inseparable. They often squirreled away food to present to each other when the other was aching with hunger. They, my mother told me, were tangled in the same blanket, when one morning Abdul woke up to find Amna cold and hard. Cold and hard, he had said. He repeated those two words as a mantra for the rest of the day, trembling.

Amna died, my mother told me, from starvation.

My whole life I’ve been surrounded by children. I take care of the children next door, and I watch them tumble onto the playground outside, rattle off multiplication tables, enjoy chocolate pudding and whipped cream as second desserts. I cannot help but compare them to the children my mother sends me every month. I have children in Somalia, Yemen, Niger, Sierra Leone, and now, Afghanistan and Iraq. They all have different stories, most too difficult to hear. But there is one common thing that every single child shares, girl or boy: starvation. The hunger is evident everywhere.

Little boys show the camera cool tricks. They can circle the entire lengths of their waists with their skeletal fingers. They can touch the dirty soles of their feet to their ears. Little girls with bird-like legs dance. They twirl to music in their heads, music that no one else can understand. I’ve had the honor of corresponding with such a girl, a few years ago. We wrote and drew pictures for each other. In greatest confidence we told each other our fears and aspirations.

She told me her biggest secret with great pride.  "If you don’t want to feel sick," she had written, "then drink a lot of water. Your belly feels big and you don’t feel sick anymore." I didn’t know how to answer her revelation. How could she understand that I was not plagued with hunger as she was? That her world was not at all like mine? I didn’t have long to worry about my response, however, when I received notice from her orphanage that she collapsed one day. She was dancing. The man on the phone, in all his nonchalance, was surprised at my grief. This kind of thing is normal, he tried to assure me. He would find me another girl to whom I could write.

I want no more children, however. No more pictures of emaciated girls and boys. My eyes are already open to the destitute life that is the future of every baby born in a third-world country. I’m no photographer, so these are my one-thousand words. I want to expose everyone in America, everyone in a comfortable home reading this, to understand that the problem of starving children is alive and well. I want everyone to hear the stories of my children. They have nothing to eat so they fill themselves with hope, with dreams. They don’t dare speak their desires because out loud they are too vulnerable, too easy to destroy. So they whisper them. One-thousand times over. They sing me to sleep and I wake up and live my life.

But their nightmares never cease.