2006
Compassion and the Hungry Child
CATEGORY:12 and Under
Operation Care
I am glad you are with us tonight for this live report in our series on childhood starvation. We are in a very remote location which is 2,000,000 acres large with a population close to 40,000. As you can tell from the people on the street, three in every ten people are under the age of sixteen. Statistics tell us that the population is getting younger every year as former residents feel the need to come home and connect with their families and their spiritual roots. Here the life expectancy is only 55 years of age. Since arriving we have seen a lot of sorrow in the young people because 267 children under the age of five die there this year. Approximately 5 young people commit suicide here each year. The school drop out rate is 70% with the teacher turnover being 800% the national average.
We meet Ella carrying water from a local stream like one of three local residents must do. Much of the water on is contaminated. Yet it is the only water many residents have. Ella tells us about her life. I worked as a nurse’s aide raising my children. We didn’t have much at times, but we made do. Now here I am at 70 years old, and I am raising these two young boys by myself while their Mom works through her problems. I went in and worked before Christmas so I would be able to give them some presents. But with my diabetes, I am not in the best of health. I try my best to care for them. Last week, I found myself choosing between buying my medication and good food for the boys – if I’m not here to help them, what will they do?”
One in three homes has no electricity. There is a large homeless population and most families never turn away a family member no matter how distant the blood relation. Those more fortunate live in old shacks, old trailers, or dilapidated mobile homes.
Ella shows us her clean but dilapidated federal house where seventeen people live. We are amazed, but she says this is normal in Pine Ridge, where it is against customs to turn away a family member no matter how distant the blood relation. She also shows us the leaking shower wall which has led to black mold. She says that ten children died last night because of lack of food and black mold. We continue to follow Ella past tent villages and cars used for shelter. She also shows us an old shack made of pallets that her brother lives in. He saved the pallets years ago when he was working in Sioux Rapids.
Ella then takes us to the school, where her grandchildren attend. Ella is afraid she might not be able to afford to send them there next year, since the tuition is $100 a year. Ella explains to us that for many children, arriving at school takes the heavy burden of caring for themselves off of their young shoulders for the hours they are in school. At early ages they have learned to survive – in a home without heat because a bill has not been paid, moving from one place to another because there is no money for rent or going to sleep still hungry because there was little for supper. Many live in fear of what will happen to them as they have already lost one parent and their grandparents are getting older. A shadow of fear crosses their faces when it is announced there will be no school.
We continue walking with Ella to the home of the American Indian Relief Council. Ella takes us inside to meet Brian Brown. Brian tells us that the average family income is $3700. They have a very successful program to help with new babies called Baby Baskets. Every new mother receives a basket of baby care supplies before she leave the hospital. To earn the Baby Basket, expectant mothers are encouraged to participate in prenatal appointments, an initial Women, Infants and Children appointment and in classes in infant first aid, breastfeeding, general baby care and nutrition.
Some of the items included in the basket are diapers, clothing, bottles, lotion, soap, formula for those who can’t breastfeed, and a hand made baby blanket. As a result, new parents have the basic tools they need to care for their baby. The Baby Baskets help to relieve some of the associated financial stress. The basket also provides many items that on the reservation are very expensive and hard to find. About 500 baskets are given out each year. Through participation in the Baby Basket Program, there are healthier pregnancies and healthier babies, better educated mothers, and improved health care habits among the Tribal members on this reservation. We thank Brian for his time and leave.
Ella then takes us to a beautiful garden ripe with all kinds of vegetables. We see many happy children working hard along side many elders. Ella explains to us that this is Running Strong for American Indian Youth gardens which feed about 3800 people on 500 family gardens. Mothers are taught to make their own baby food.
The Slim Buttes Agriculture Development Project gives free seedlings and seeds to the families that sign up to host a garden. The project also sends in a free tractor to work the plot to be used as a garden. At the same time they are learning their heritage and a work ethic in a community where unemployment is 90%.
Next we follow Ella on a long walk past more dilapidated homes. She is headed to Project Village Earth’s buffalo heard. The project is a symbol of fewer starving children on the reservation. Project Village Earth donated 15 buffalo to the tribe leader. In two years they will raise enough calves that the tribe leader can gift 15 buffalo to another family. This helps the people utilize their land for income-generating activities and support a more self-sufficient lifestyle.
Leaving behind the buffalo we return to school just in time for lunch. Ella wants to show us the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute funded study called Pathways. This program is trying to prevent childhood diseases by offering healthier alternatives, combining healthy eating practices and increased physical activity. The three major components of the program are family involvement, physical activity, and school meals. We noticed how eagerly the young children were eating fresh fruits and vegetables. Ella explained that most the school lunch is supplemented with lots of healthy food choices. We are serving over 7000 meals each month and last week our food director told me that with the rising costs it is going to cost us an additional $2800 per month to provide the fresh fruits and vegetables.
We thank Ella for her time. Ella lives not in some far away country, but right here in the USA for we are in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
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.
