by Tad de Bordenave
We turn to another member of God’s Other Children, the hungry. In the parable of the Sheep and the Goats Jesus tells us, “I was hungry and you fed me.” These 818 million children are our brothers and sisters and they are hungry.
Like the other children we look at, these children of God do not make the news, they live far away and are mostly strangers to us. They are simply overlooked. Sadly, to many, they are considered unimportant, insignificant, and even unworthy. Very little is known of them within church and mission circles. The thing is, they are God’s children. He counts them as worthy. They are made in his image and many will become followers of his Son Jesus Christ. He wants them fed.
We will focus our attention on the hungry of Chad. Chad’s location may not come to mind easily. This is a landlocked country in the middle of Africa, a nation contiguous with Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan, The Central African Republic, and Niger. In 1880 when the French and British powers were divvying up the African continent, the land of Chad went to the French. It remained a French colony until 1960. Today its population is about 15 million. Significant for this article, 87% of them live on about $1.25 per day.
There are three major indices for understanding the living conditions of the nations of the world. They reflect development, freedom, and suffering. Chad ranks respectively 36th from the bottom, 10th, and 26th. That translates to less than 50 hospitals, 7 beds for every 10,000 people, 250 doctors, 2,500 schools, and 48% literacy rate (much lower for women). Not a happy place to live, work, and raise a family.
There are measurements of hunger that take it beyond the painful pictures. When drilling down about hunger, the definition includes undernutrition, food scarcity, famine, calories, food insecurity, and more. World Food Project, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, covers the topic thoroughly at its website given below.
Hunger reaches deeper than just the stomach. The results of hunger reduce the size of the brain, especially in young children in their formative years. Hunger reduces the attention span and puts organs at risk. It brings threats to pregnancy and neo-natal conditions. In Chad it has reduced the life expectancy to 44 years.
The pictures of the hungry do grip us, as they should. There is no need for posting more; we know them all too well. Instead, I will give here a link to pictures of children in Chad as they make the effort to get clean water. That is a luxury there, with only 38% of them having access to it, and less than 5% with access to good sanitation.
Envision a family’s life in Chad. It takes an effort which we resist, but it is worthwhile. A mother holding her severely undernourished two-year-old knows depths of sadness, sorrow, depression, fear, and painful love. What we would call her support system does not exist. And there are thousands of these mothers in Chad. Their fathers and brothers walk for miles in search of hospitals, but they are out of reach. Same for food that is usually not available. And solutions are ephemeral.
The effort to empathize must include teenagers who have been stunted physically by years of malnutrition and intellectually by poor literacy. We must not omit the support staffs—they serve in the face of odds and circumstances that no one would want. These stay and serve in the poorly equipped hospitals, they try to teach children with vacant looks, they look for assistance through the corrupt maze of the powerful. They suffer in loneliness and grief.
In addition, there are social, emotional, and political consequences. The villages of Chad are ripe for predators. The rage of the poor makes them susceptible to deceit. People with promises of hope bring radicalization. The results appear in the dozens of paramilitary cadres that run throughout the country.
Hunger means more than too few calories.
To them, the petition in the Lord’s Prayer carries critical hope and passionate fervor: “Give us this day our daily bread.” That prayer should direct our thoughts to the 818 million people that are considered in the danger range of malnutrition.
Verses abound that remind us not to spend our money on bread that does not satisfy, not to gorge on manna, and to live by every word of the Lord. But, clear as they are, they do not cross out the Lord’s compassion for the hungry. His feeding 9,000 men and their families reveal how deeply he felt for them.
The hungry of the world crosses all latitudes. What we see in Chad is seen in other places in the world. We read about those near starvation in the Tigray area of Ethiopia, in Afghanistan, and in Yemen. And China–one of the common greetings in China has been, “Have you eaten today?” Chad represents the other 800 million of whom we do not read.
Next week I will describe the multiple forms of evil that leave a swath of hunger in Chad.
As with the other articles, I close with two questions: what can we offer them, and what can we receive?
We can offer the effort to follow them in a typical day. We will know we have come close to them when we sense a rise in our own sorrow, anger, prayer, and horror,
What we can receive is a truer assessment of what we have—letting it uncover what we do not need, should not crave, and can give away.
