My Take on World Hunger

You go throughout your entire day satisfied and nourished. Your mind is running on all cylinders and your stomach is calm and quiet. Never once do you wonder how else it could be. Never once do you have to ignore a growling stomach. Never once have you given up your food so that a younger sibling or your own child could eat.

This is not the case for millions of people worldwide. Men, women, and children go without food or even clean water on a regular basis. People here, in Livonia; people up the freeway in Detroit; people across the Atlantic in Europe, struggling through wars and nuclear accidents that cause devastation and, you guessed it, hunger. Starving people live near and far, all around the world. But many of the more fortunate people can only see the distended bellies of children in Africa.

World hunger is the most ridiculous, unnecessary, cruel problem we have today. There is enough food to go around, but people are selfish, ignorant, and unable to understand issues that don’t affect them. Human services groups are often turned away in countries that purposely want to starve their citizens.

Take Darfur for example. The government punished the citizens for protesting because of their awful policies by denying them food, help from other countries and even sending gangs to kill any citizens they can. Thankfully, there are some relief camps, but relief camps cannot solve all our problems and cannot last forever.

I think there is a lot more work going on today to help the hungry then there was in the past. Groups like UNICEF( http://www.unicefusa.org/work/), World Vision (http://www.worldvision.org/), and FreeRice, (www.freerice.com/), are working hard to help hungry people in many different ways. They are all organizations Americans can be a part of, and even children can help with. FreeRice is my personal favorite, because it teaches you languages, geography, math, and art while you help donate food.

The trouble now, when we have sufficient supplies to feed, clothe, employ, and house struggling people in broken down nations, is getting relief groups into the country and working on ground level to turn things around. I don’t think its too much to ask of powerful governments (take U.S. for example) to step in, even if they are unwelcome, and fix this problem.

It’s not too much of a stretch for us to invade Iraq for absolutely no reason. It’s not too much of a struggle for us to invade Afghanistan when they killed all of 3,000 people. Yet it’s too much for our government to invade countries that are starving their people. Or even to provide enough aide for people within the United States that are hungry.