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Children are going hungry in OUR communities – do you see them?

Children are going hungry in OUR communities – do you see them?

There are indeed poor starving children in Africa. But in Cape Town, South Africa, that is not what you see. At least not at first. The beauty of the landscape – with mountains rising up out of the sea, and the European-like metropolis in between, draws all your attention and takes your breath away. This certainly was the point of the architects of apartheid who, in the early 1960s, forcibly removed entire black and “colored” neighborhoods and set them up in townships, located just outside the urban sight lines.

I was in a group that recently visited one of the townships. Even though South Africa has had an open democracy since 1994, the townships still exist, because the punishing economy has not enabled many people to leave. The townships are not easy to find. Our driver, a South African who had lived in the Cape Town area for eight years, had never been to one before. There were 1.2 million people crammed into shanties or block houses that were no bigger than a one-car garage. There were kids everywhere. They didn’t seem to be starving, but it was clear they were poor. They played in the alleys and streets, avoiding the garbage and fetid pools of water. Many were parentless, having been rendered orphans by the raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS.

For many Americans my age, we associated poor starving kids in Africa with vegetables, which we were admonished to eat by our parents so as not to deny food to children on the other side of the world who didn’t have any. I never quite figured out how the logic worked, but the challenge was enough to get us to finish eating carrots or beets – and also insured that we wouldn’t in fact need to see kids who were in desperate need.

Today we don’t have to go to Africa to find poor children. Fully one quarter of American kids live in poverty. And they are not easily seen – even in Newark, whose downtown landscape is dominated by the Prudential Center and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. I don’t know if kids are starving, but they certainly are hungry. The number of kids receiving free lunch in New Jersey rose 24% in the last five years. More children are eligible for free breakfast – and the money is there to provide breakfast, but many towns and school systems haven’t set up the feeding programs yet. Maybe they just don’t want to know that the need is there. Maybe they don’t want to see these hungry kids.

And if kids aren’t hungry for food, they are often hungry for relationships – or for affirmation that isn’t predicated on their ability to perform, which is often the case in more affluent communities.

The church needs to learn how to see these kids and their hunger, in all its manifestations – physical, emotional and spiritual. The church needs to make sure local communities see these kids as well – and then make sure they are provided with more attention and an adequate response. There is a temptation to keep hunger out of the sight lines of our communities. The church can lead the way in making sure these kids are seen.

Comments

Mark--thank you for this remembrance and for recasting the brutal contradictions of Capetown and urban (and I would add, increasingly suburban) American in such stark relief.  I hope your words and our experience will spur action.  As the holiday season approaches, we will soon see appeals to help hungry children all over the place.  The task continues to be solving the systemic problems that keeps generation after generation of children in such poverty.  Of course this is year-round work that requires that we see differently and then act accordingly.  You've inspired my own reflections as I think about Syracuse--thank you. 

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