Hundreds of people die every day due to the famine in the southern regions of Somalia.
750 thousand people are famine affected an increase of 66% from July.
Totally four million people or 53% of the Somalia population are in crisis at the moment.
World wide the statistic are just as disturbing.
It is difficult for me to understand why we are not shocked, and shamed that more than 24-thousand people a day die from hunger and hunger related diseases.
75 percent of those deaths are children under the age of five.
If somehow, all of us, were able to see the pictures of those starving currently in Kenya, in America and elsewhere I suspect there would first be a feeling of guilt, then commitment, for who can stand idly by and not cry from the societal shame of inaction.
The hungry are not strangers even though we don't know their names. They are a precious part of the human family.
When a person, adult or child starves, a gnawing knot painfully tightens in the belly as the body desperately tries not to feed upon itself. Nothing eases the pain and the body grows weaker and weaker.
I have read that one in ten people in New York State where I live and I suspect other states as well are what are called "food insecure" meaning they don't have enough to eat or are at risk of going hungry. We just got word yesterday that one in six Americans are now in the poverty bracket
Sure, we don't know them personally. They don't know us, but we are part of each other. Part of the problem is that we have dehumanized hunger to numbers, instead of names.
I would submit that if we go deeply within our being we must acknowledge that if one of us is hungry, all of us are in ways that nourishment can never cure.
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