bringing dinner back

“A lack of give a damn” — David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, on why 1.02 billion people worldwide are hungry and one child dies every five seconds from not getting enough to eat.

Orphans in Rwanda awaiting life-changing pigs.

At my house, we use the terms “hungry” and “full.” We throw them around willy-nilly actually, as I’m sure you do at yours. I’ve learned two phrases in the past year — “food secure” and “food insecure” — that mean similar things yet create a larger context.

“Food secure” is a phrase I first heard during a 2008 trip to Rwanda, my first trip to Africa. It means a sack of soybeans and cassava flour stashed in the corner of an adobe home with dirt floors and two meals a day through the next harvest season. The orphans who defined it for me showed off their sacks like a child here might show a championship baseball trophy.

“Food insecure” is a phrase I came across late last year while organizing a “staymission” for Greenland Hills UMC, my beloved small, progressive Methodist church. Since everyone can’t go to Rwanda and we’d canceled our family mission trip to Juarez because of drug violence, I was looking for something our entire congregation could take part in. You’ve heard of a “staycation,” where people vacation close to home because of the economy and gas prices? Same thing, only we’d be feeding local hungry people instead of enjoying the pool at the Great Wolf Lodge.

During our staymission, I read a story in The New York Times about how food pantries are suffering from high food prices and low donations. In the second half of 2008, demand for food aid in the U.S. increased 20 to 40 percent, depending on your region. One in nine U.S. households don’t have enough food at some point during the year. This is our “food insecure” population, the phrase our government uses instead of “hungry.”

Sweet boy in a Rwandan rice field

The phrase immediately annoyed me because it sounded so clinical. Hungry is personal. Hungry is stomach growling, craving, shaky, fixating on what you wish were on a plate in front of you. It’s more than that but that’s as hungry as I’ve ever been.

Yet I have to be honest, hungry Americans don’t keep me up at night. Hunger isn’t starvation. And starvation is way sexier on the mission scale than hunger.

During our staymission, I joined a local icon among the Dallas homeless, the SoupMan, for lunch one day. Each weekday, the SoupMan loads up a van of soup, sandwiches, drinks, desserts, and heads to a parking lot near Fair Park. As he gets closer, his van blares out the Rocky theme. Just before we loaded up, the SoupMan, David Timothy, reminded us of an idea I had apparently left back in Rwanda: “We are giving two things today and food isn’t the most important of the two,” he told us. “Love is.”

Quite the rice field charmer, isn't he?

There are many differences between the people I handed peanut butter sandwiches to within a mile of my house and the children I picked rice with half a world away. But their commonalities are significant: They are hungry. And they have not always been treated like human beings.

Another phrase I learned in Rwanda is “misery tourism.” Greg Jenks, founder of ZOE Ministry, used this phrase to encourage us not just to go home, show our sad pictures and tell our sad stories. If we didn’t do something to help, we would just be tourists to their miserable circumstances. The phrase came back to me as I took photos in the SoupMan’s line of these human beings and their different yet miserable circumstances.

My heart is still in Rwanda much of the time. And I still say “hungry” and “full” without thinking about it too much. But taking someone from “food insecure” to “food secure” is more than taking them from hungry to sated or from starved to satisfied. It is, as I learned at Fair Park and in Rwanda, taking them from a shunned statistic to human being — whether we are in a rice field in Rwanda or handing out PBJs in a church parking lot near the fairgrounds.

Each week, as part of this blog project, I will feature a country in Africa (which is why this project will take 53 weeks). Why not feature more local information? Why not just help here in Dallas? Because Africa is my passion. And that’s OK. If everyone followed just one passion, the world would be such a different place.

I start with Rwanda because, for me, that’s where this journey began. Where that journey will take me and my family over these 53 weeks, who knows. Giving a damn is always a risk, isn’t it?