In honor of World Food Day (Oct. 16) and Blog Action Day which is focusing on “Food” this year, I wanted to quickly point you all to two awareness pieces.
Interview with Free The Children
I recently did an interview with Craig Kielburger, co-founder of the nonprofit Free The Children on what is truly going on in East Africa. While many of the international TV crews have long left, the suffering remains and here’s a snippet of a poignant story he told me:
I met a man named Abraham Ali at the refugee camp, and he was waiting there to be processed, standing with his son who was 6 years old and he was telling me about how he left southern Somalia when his crops failed. When he realized he couldn’t feed his family anymore, he started walking with his four children and his wife.
He described how they walked for 21 days, and his children, one-by-one, started to fall, and he’d bury them on the side of the road. Then his wife died, and he had to bury her on the side of the road also. He said that he wanted to simply lay down himself and die, except that he had one child left who he managed to get to the camp, and simply because of that one factor that motivated his life, he kept walking.
I look at that story of Abraham Ali, and he was just one man among thousands…there’s 30,000 waiting to be processed at the camp to gain entry, and what amazed me the most was that there was no international news agency waiting there to hear his story. That he was now one of the countless faces and his 6-year old child who was with him was one of countless faces too.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
The most obscene word
The latest from one of my favorite advocacy groups, ONE, is a public service announcement declaring famine the most obscene word beyond the other “f” word. Famine truly is man-made and should not exist in this day and age. But yet, families and communities across the world continue to be devastated by this plague.
If you’d like to help, you can start by signing this petition imploring congress to fully fund Feed the Future.
Nice Lola. I know what you mean about the flavors of home. And while I have no children, I can understand the need to fill them in on my own culture as well as the one they live in.
What a heartbreaking story. Sometimes I think if I took in all the horrors of the world I would lose the will to live. At the same time, we need to make it better. Things like Blog Action Day, World Food Day, help to bring awareness. Thanks for sharing this story.