Hunger is a Relative Term

Pardon the blurriness of this picture. But I can't stop thinking about it. It's the first one I took once the plane touched down at JFK, from the TV monitor near baggage claim. I almost dismissed it as just more CNN background noise until I looked up and saw the backpacks.

In case you can't read the blurry lettering, it says "Hungry Kids." It reminded me of a story I had pitched, but didn't get to do, for NPR a few years ago. In fact, it may have been about one of the very first programa in the country that sent poor children home with backpacks full of canned goods and other simple foodstuffs over the weekend. I pre-interviewed one of the teachers who started the program, and she said it began after she was working in her classroom one weekend and some of her students came to her window and asked if she had anything to eat. She gave them some peanut butter and crackers, and that was her "lightbulb moment."

This was why some kids were extra lethargic and hard to teach on Monday mornings. They hadn't had much to eat over the weekend. The teacher figured if they could go home with a bit of extra food to help tide them and their families over, it might improve learning and performance.

I thought it was a great idea, which is why I pitched it to editors. And I also thought it spoke volumes about the things we Americans take for granted. I think that's part of why my editor didn't greenlight the story. He probably thought it was just a small pilot project, and surely not a big enough problem to warrant a national feature story.

Well, that was before the Fall of 2008, and the Global Economic Crisis. Clearly, my timing was off, because it seems that all across America, food banks are running out food, soup kitchens are reporting triple the clients, and for poor kids, hunger is a growing problem.

In America.

That's why CNN was doing the backpacks story. It was quite a wake-up call for me, arriving in the Land of Plenty after a year and a half in a poor Third World country. There's actual famine in Kenya now, thanks to a major drought, and theft of emergency grain reserves, and overwhelming levels of intense poverty. I see hungry, desperately poor women and children in the streets of Nairobi every day. You get to the point where you simply accept it as part of the scenery. If you tried to help every one of them, you'd find yourself in a financial bind.

But the CNN story reminded me of the energetic discussion at Cousin George and Cousin Carole's Christmas Eve supper, right before I headed to the airport. One of the other guests, an African American professor at a Nairobi University, was arguing that the obscene political corruption in Kenya was threatening the country's future development. When Education officials steal so much money, it means Free Education for kids will be suspended, that has a direct, negative impact on the country's future.

Cousin Carole's argument was that corruption in Kenya was no worse than the policies in the US that lead to layoffs, lousy educational systems, high unemployment and other ills faced in American society. She said it's even worse, because on the surface, America has so much. Yet when millions of American kids either drop out or leave high school having no skills and barely able to read, that's corruption. It was an intriguing take on a topic I've focused on for years--Poverty in America.

You see, I've spent a lot of time feeling inundated and overwhelmed by just how much lack and need and desperation there is in Kenya. So it was quite a wake up call to touch down in America and be reminded that there are many people struggling here. Is it any better or worse to be poor and hungry in America? Should we be just as disturbed about an American kid tapping on his teacher's window and begging for food as we are about the child in a Northern Kenya village who's malnourished and suffering?

I don't know. I guess hunger is a relative term.