A Closer Look at Life

Memories of Addis, Part 3

I originally tried to post the following story from a cyber-café in Addis, but internet connections, like many things in the developing world cannot be relied on to deliver the dependable service we anticipate in the West.  When I got back to the states I discovered that the post had disappeared, never to be seen again.

The café was in a squat little building that opened onto the alley behind our hotel.   We tried many cyber-cafés around our hotel, and this one was certainly the slowest.  On one side of the café was a travel agency that seemed surprisingly official, given its humble location.  The rest of the row of shops was taken up with the kind of clothing stores and other shops that seem to be in the act of vomiting forth their entire product line right as you walk by.  In front of every establishment, save the café, a small group of young men stood about talking and eyeing us curiously as we walked past. 

We needed only to walk halfway abound the block to get to the café.  Regardless, it was still quite a production for being such a short journey.  We had not gone 20 yards form the hotel before we had attracted a small army of interested locals, all intent on selling us something.  We had the pleasure of their company until we were safely inside the café, and even then their entreaties reached us through the door.

Among the many varieties of hawkers, there were little girls, dressed in rags and seeming only to know the English words “hungry” and “please!”.  Despite their unkempt appearance, they all had shoe-box sized trays of gum and mints, as neatly stocked and packaged as any gum display in an American convenience store. At first, my heart went out to them.  The more of them we saw, the inevitable question arose.  “Where did they get all the gum?”

The all too disheartening answer is that they got the gum from the people they work for.  Perhaps it was a parent or relative.  Perhaps it was their owner, and they were working as indentured servants or slaves.  Likely as not, these little girls, still shy of their first double digit birthday, were probably orphans and were forced to work as beggars in a racket where someone else gets to keep all the profits. 

There were also the shoe-shine boys.  Usually in their early teens, these boys could be seen all over town carrying their small box of shine and rags.  They seemed to be in one of the legitimate informal businesses of the streets, as I saw many an Ethiopian taking advantage of their services.  They were quite insistent, and it took a very stern tone to dismiss them, which was harder to muster than I expected.  Feeling the lump of money in my pocket, I thought of how glad they would be to have it, but I knew it could be unwise and even dangerous to give in.

Older and more aggressive than these two groups were the “friends.”  These men in their early 20s all knew English well, and were eager to make your acquaintance.  “Hey!  My friend!” they would call from beyond the hotel gate before we even reached it.  After that salutation would come a running stream of offers of all kinds.  Walking into a business or getting into a car seemed the only way to be rid of them once they latched on to you. 

We encountered all these groups on our short walk to the café.  The hierarchy was evident, and the little girls were shushed away by the shoe-shine boys who were, in turn, dispatched by the “friends.”  We had misjudged the opening time of the café, and were thus subjected to a barrage of questions as we stood on the street for a couple minutes while the girl inside wiped the screens with a damp cloth. 

“Who is your friend?”

“Where are you from?”

“Do you want to go on a tour of the city?”

“Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“Do you need a taxi?”
(Here we were mercifully allowed inside.  Our interrogators stayed in the doorway, lobbing questions in at us like hand grenades. 
“Are you looking for a party?”

“Do you want a girl?”

Scott’s head snapped around.  I looked up at the questioner in the doorway.  His face was covered in the hideous smile that evil men the world over use to feign trustworthiness when they seek to harm their fellow man.  It was an evil, shark’s smile.

“No… we don’t want a girl.” Scott responded in a slow measured tone.  His rebuff came out like a threat. 

It must have gotten the point across, or that was the last option in the bag, because the men left shortly after, assuring us that they would be around when we needed them. 

I sat there dumbfounded.  It is one thing seeing a kid on the street reduced to performing a menial task for pennies to survive.  It is worse to see kids being forced to sell a product so others can benefit.  It is another thing entirely to be offered another human being for pure entertainment or convenience, as though she were no more important than a taxi or a stack of black-market DVD’s. 

I don’t know if those two characters could personally have found a prostitute for us if we had agreed to it.  I do not doubt, however, that somewhere on the other end of a chain of partners and contacts, a real woman, or more probably, a young girl was waiting for her next bit of work somewhere in a shanty or a low, dirty building.  In all probability she was a slave, trafficked in from the countryside of Ethiopia.  She may have even been sold by her own family to pay off debt, or simply to buy food.  She may have been forced to serve several men a day, never seeing a dime of the substantial profit she was turning for her masters.  If she was not already infected with HIV, it is only a matter of time until she will be.

Looking back on this encounter, I am deeply saddened at the willingness of those two men to violate the most fundamental of rules God (and many other religions and social codes) gave for human interaction: to protect and take care of one another.  Given the hard, unforgiving life they had probably lived, I suppose their actions are not surprising.

What is surprising, however, is something Scott pointed out to me later.  They would not ask visiting foreigners if they wanted a prostitute at the sobering hour of 9:00 in the morning (on a weekday) unless sometimes the answer is “yes”.

Who's Hungry?

While the Great Leap Forward is a fascinating study in the systemic failure of communism as a functional governing system, I do not mention it here to critique it for its untenable ideological underpinnings.  I bring it up because it offers us a unique perspective on hunger.

In the history of bad ideas, there are few worse than the Great Leap Forward.  The plan, implemented by the Communist Chinese government in 1958, was targeted at increasing the production of the agricultural and industrial sectors of the Chinese economy by taking advantage of the seemingly endless labor pool of the Chinese peasantry. By the time the plan was scrapped and grain imports began in 1961, some estimates put the death toll from starvation at more than 40 million people. 

It has been reported that many of the people who died during the Great Leap forward did not die from simple lack of nutrients.  They were poisoned.  Finding no suitable food source, many peasants had begun looking for any alternative, going so far as to consume the very dirt they farmed in an attempt to gain any form of nutrient they could possibly find.  Not surprisingly, eating large amounts of soil, an activity the human digestive system was never designed for, quickly proved fatal. 

I first heard this from a Chinese history professor in college.  What was meant as an illustrative anecdote has stuck with me ever since.  That was the first time I was exposed to the idea that starvation is not simply the lack of something to eat.  It is the lack of  something that nourishes. 

As an example, look no further than our own chronically obese population.

There are some in medicine today that suggest that one of the major causes of obesity in America is not, in fact, overeating.  For many people, losing weight has less to do with quantity of food consumed and more to do with quality. 

There is medical evidence that shows if the body is not provided adequate nutrients, it will begin storing anything it can process as fat, thinking that lean times are at hand.  As a result, the person trying to lose weight by simply cutting the number of  Diet Cokes they drink and eating one less Big Mac a week is actually fighting upstream.  By simply providing the body with less junk food, they may be raising the rate at which the body is storing fat, thus abrogating much of the potential weight loss purchased with their lowered caloric intake.  Sadly, this is not the sort of weight loss news to get headlines.

This notion of starvation as a lack of nutrients has broader application than understanding why America is morbidly obese, why we care what kind of gas mileage we get, or what will happen to the poor Somalis that can no longer buy grain with their devalued currency. 

Beyond these more visible, tangible forms of starvation lie the emotional starvation of orphans and those widowed by war and other tragedies.  There is also the relational starvation that can be found in the most affluent American suburbs where busy parents throw money at the increasing angst of their children who are crying to be noticed and loved.  We see the same principle at work in porn addicts, adrenaline junkies and alcoholics; all trying to squeeze some feeling from their empty addiction.  The list of hungers of the human spirit is nearly endless.  Beyond, or perhaps beneath, even these forms of hunger lies the spiritual starvation experienced by nearly everyone on the planet.  It is not a starvation that many would admit to, or even notice. 

Hunger occurs when a basic need, be it physical, emotional or spiritual, is not met.  I believe every human has a hunger within them for the Divine.  Opinion may vary on this point, but I believe the preponderance of evidence throughout history is in favor of this claim.  Throughout time and across the world, people struggle to find higher meaning, greater significance; some kind of transcendent knowledge that satisfies the mind and soul.  Whether it is Buddhism, Christianity, Secular Humanism, Islam, Money or a host of other alternatives; all of us are looking for something.  We all have souls that need to be fed, and even the best human relationships and most ideal physical conditions fall pitifully short.

It is on this point that the experiences of Chinese, peasant farmers becomes salient for me.  That they would resort to poisoning themselves by eating dirt in an attempt to avoid starvation reminds me that when hunger becomes great enough, any alternative, no matter how foolish and empty, will become a viable option.  Similarly, the frustration of the overweight fast food junkie reminds me that abstaining from an empty, unhealthy thing does not always equate to filling myself with something valuable and substantive.

When I wake up each day, I am faced with a question common to all mankind.  All our souls our hungry; what are we going to fill them with? 

1 "Come, all you who are thirsty,
       come to the waters;
       and you who have no money,
       come, buy and eat!
       Come, buy wine and milk
       without money and without cost.

2 Why spend money on what is not bread,
       and your labor on what does not satisfy?
       Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
       and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.

3 Give ear and come to me;
       hear me, that your soul may live.
       I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
       my faithful love promised to David.

                                                    Isaiah 55:1-3

There is no promise more glorious than God’s.  There is no food so satisfying to the soul as His love. 

There are no reasons but fear or pride to refuse that which is given for free.

Driven to Starvation

If one reads the news these days, there is no escaping the panicked stories about the rising cost of staple grains.  There is little doubt that the world’s population is getting larger, and hungrier, by the day.  One may well wonder what has brought this seemingly cataclysmic condition upon us so quickly.  Many different groups are being accused of causing this new crisis, with the average Chinese peasant, Western alternative energy producers and commodities traders in the Philippines standing together in the line-up.  I suggest a different cause; one that hits a little closer to home.

In less than two months, global news coverage of the plight of the hungry has gone from non-existent to a full fledged feeding frenzy, no pun intended. Even bio-fuel manufacturing is being senselessly implicated in this terror of the month. Some news reporters, and even news makers, seem to have forgotten that a substantial portion of US corn production is dedicated to producing corn-based sweeteners for non-essential products like Coca-Cola.  Much land is also used to grow corn used to feed cattle that are helping to meet the rising demand for diary and beef in rapidly growing Asian markets. 

Feeding the world’s hungry is certainly a growing problem.  Whoever you blame, the fact remains that the global population is continuing to grow, and it must be fed.  This is a new kind of hunger too, with the new concentrations of the under-fed being found in urban areas rather than impoverished rural settings. 

When we were in Ethiopia, we were told that the government there had undertaken actions to raise the price of the indigenous staple grain teff by nearly 600% in less than two years.  The plan was designed to help impoverished farmers by artificially raising the price of their biggest product.  While it accomplished the increase in the price of teff, it has also brought about a predictable rise in farming related goods and services, thus abrogating much of the anticipated windfall for the farmers. 

The farmers, many barely more than subsistence grade, have so far weathered the storm. The business of fighting to grow enough to survive is not so susceptible to fickle market forces.  In the cities, however, millions of poor are facing an astronomic increase in the cost of food, often the largest portion of their budgets.

In reality, however, the commodities traders, bio-fuel makers and even Coke drinkers are only a small part of the problem.  Perhaps the biggest reason food prices are rising is the increasing cost of oil. 

Around the world, the urban, jobless poor are finding themselves at the mercy of seemingly unrelated issues half a world away.  Unrest in the Niger delta, American foreign policy in the Gulf, frustratingly shrewd production caps by OPEC, huge SUVs on Western highways and pension related strikes in Scotland continue to push the cost of oil into historically high territory. The knock-on effects are felt at every level the world over.

Today we are beginning to see a new kind of hunger.  With farming techniques and technology continuing to raise production levels across the industrialized world, the availability of food-stuffs is growing.  Shortage of resources is no longer the problem.  The cost of transportation, thanks to rising oil prices, and the hoarding of staple goods through commodities trading on futures markets is driving the cost of staple foods higher and higher.  Across the world grocery store shelves are full of food.  The problem is, no one has the money to buy it.  We are entering a new era where global production and allocation of resources and commodities must be more intentional and directed if it is to meet rising demands. 

We are entering a period of history unlike any known before.  We will soon find ourselves in a world where others suffer not from our inaction or our lack of charity.  People will begin to suffer when we fail to use our resources wisely.  Compassion for the poor will soon be more closely related to the conscientious use of our resources than many of us ever expected. 

We as Americans, and particularly the Christians among us have an opportunity, and, I think, an obligation to help prevent a crisis that may soon affect people we will never meet.  If we were to merely engage in the simple, yet frustratingly interdependent, act of carpooling, we could have large effects on the quality of life of those living in the fragile economies of the developing world.  As the largest consumer of oil on the planet, Americans have the greatest potential to lower demand for oil by making small changes in our daily lives, thus lowering the price of oil, and by extension, the price of food in developing countries. 

The question at hand is not a matter of resource shortages.  It is simply that Americans and those in other westernized countries are not economical with their resources because it is not convenient for them to do so.  In a purely Darwinian view of life, selfless economization is not a matter of concern.  The Haves can do as they wish, and charity is an option. 

On this point, the Gospel of Christ differs greatly from the conventional wisdom.  From what I have read of the Bible, I am to consider everyone the world over as family.  Christians are called, I believe, to act with the interests of others in mind, even when there is no direct benefit to themselves.  After all, that is the basic definition of love. 

While on earth, Christ called us to and then exemplified compassion; by definition “suffering with” those he encountered.  My “suffering” could begin by riding a bike to work, getting up a little earlier to catch a bus or even buying a smaller, more efficient car so that others can eat.  To me, that seems a light burden to bear to begin fulfilling the commands of God.