Hunger

Last Wednesday I helped one of the clinical officer students conduct a delivery. It went smoothly, the little girl emerged screaming as the walls of the only world she knew pushed her into the boundless. A healthy pink small baby. We dried and covered her, the student cut the cord and then we stood waiting for the placenta. Five minutes . . .ten minutes . . . fifteen minutes . . . The charge nurse passed by concerned and asked if she could check. She gloved and followed the cord up and then said, “There’s another baby.” (Note to self – always check for a twin!) The nurse ruptured the membranes, a second little girl came out crying, and the two placentas slid out effortlessly. The students, nurses, and I all laughed at my mistake with the undiagnosed twins but as we laughed the mother looked down at them and then to no one in particular said, “How I am going to feed these two with all the hunger?”

Malawi is facing the worst famine that it has faced in years. In some regions people have already run out of food, having eaten all the maize set aside for consumption, they begin to eat the maize to be used for selling and planting, meaning that (1) they are not generating any income, and (2) next year will be another year of hunger because harvest will again be insufficient. There is food available for purchase in stores but it is priced well above what most people can afford. These day the newspapers frequently run stories of children dying, and people eating seeds and other “inedible” items. A couple weeks ago six children in the same family died from eating a poisonous plant.

While the people are starving, the government is embroiled in the politics of attempting to impeach the President. The full story is long and confusing but the central issue seems to be that once elected, the President created his own party, leaving behind the party that helped him to power. He had a great start, really pushing anti-corruption to the forefront of his agenda but recently he seems to be cracking under the stress of the impeachment process. Meanwhile aid agencies are equally tangled into immobility, debating both the severity of the famine and the best way to alleviate the suffering.

Even being here where the signs of growing anxiety filter into every scene, whether it’s in the labor ward or in the street when laughing children interrupt their play to approach you and say, “hungry,” I still feel personally removed. Some part of me wants to share the pain, believing that the experience would ward against coping mechanisms adopted by the confused and privileged (e.g. general apathy, changing the channel, averting the eyes, etc.). But, I can never truly know life in that way, there will always be distance, and history, and other countless buffers. So, where do we begin as individuals to right so many layers of wrongs? to live every day in a way that leaves space for life not merely to exist but to flourish? (This I see as the difference between a blade of grass fighting its way through a crack in the pavement and a sea of wildflowers covering a hillside.) How do we sustain the belief that global inequalities, national inequalities, individual inequities, the capacity of power to pervert and persuade, the desperation and corrupting force of poverty, are simply stories or patterns that may be rewritten or redirected? . . . I don’t know.