Memories in a Grain of Rice

I had rice as part of my dinner last night. I didn’t finish it and a couple of spoon fulls were left on my plate.  As I scraped the plate I was struck by a memory. A sad memory. A memory that almost made me ashamed.

Many years ago there was an advertisement for a hunger program. It was an emotional request for donations for hunger relief.

A little boy was sitting on the ground, somewhere in a third world country. A truck had just left the area delivering bags of rice to a village to help keep the community from starvation. A small amount of rice had spilled from the burlap bags of rice.

The next scene had a child scraping through the dirt picking up individual grains of rice. He did so one grain at a time and put them into a tiny container. The image was and is powerful.

Hunger in this world is rampant. Thousands of children die of hunger and hunger related diseases each day. We in the comfortable and seemingly civilized world forget or never knew what it was like or is like to be hungry.

I remembered last night. It came from an ancient memory embedded deep within my heart. I didn’t pick-out the grains of rice from my garbage, but I wanted too.