Because I‘ve worked for 27 years for an agency that focuses on the alleviation of hunger, some of my acquaintances tease me for not having, by now, solved this devastating global problem. Though said in jest, it’s hard not to smart a little from their friendly jibes.

Television and the Internet regularly bring the victims of the latest natural and man-made tragedies such as floods, famines and wars immediately into our living rooms.

Some of these disasters can’t be prevented. Hunger -cited by the World Health Organization as the No. #1 health problem in the world- is not one of them!

One child dies every 6 seconds from hunger-related causes (FAO, and more than1 billion of the earth’s inhabitants go to bed hungry every night (World Bank), even when it has been established that the planet now produces enough to provide every person in the world 2 lbs. of food a day.

Is our acceptance of this situation based on a belief that the human family is destined by Fate always to be so divided?

In Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, Cassius urges Brutus to action by saying: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

In so many ways we have allowed ourselves to become underlings - to become docilely subordinate to, and accepting of, a global system that can only be described as one of crass inequality.

The 225 richest individuals in the world together possess wealth equal to the combined wealth of 47% of the world’s population (UNDP).

One out of 2,500 women in the United States dies in childbirth. In Afghanistan that number is a mind-boggling one out of 7 (Newsweek July 2007).

One out of 6 people in the world lacks access to potable water (UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2006), while in the United States we use billions of gallons of clean, drinking water each day just to flush our human waste.

In the scriptures of the Christian tradition Jesus tells the story of a rich man, Dives, and a poor beggar, Lazarus. They live side by side - the rich man in opulence, the beggar in misery, sprawled on the ground, at the gate just outside of the wealthy man’s property. They both die. The poor man receives a heavenly reward; the wealthy man goes to a place of torment.

One fascinating commentary on this story says that the rich man’s culpability consisted not solely in his not helping the beggar, but in his never having paid attention to him. Jesus makes it a point to say that even the dogs noticed, for they came and gently licked the poor man’s sores.



The wealthy man was “oblivious” of the poor man’s plight. Or was it that he found it easier not to see it?



To be sure, allowing the world’s pain seep into our souls is an uncomfortable enterprise.

As an undergraduate studying philosophy I recall classmates and I wrestling with the problem of evil and injustice in the world. Distraught, one colleague finally demanded that our professor weigh in with his remedy for all the cosmic unfairness.

“You do what you can, when you can,” Dr. Leonard Glavin answered calmly.

This fall, cities and towns throughout the USA, doing “what they can, when they can,” will hold community- wide events called CROP Hunger Walks. The walks raise awareness of the problem of hunger, as well as funds for local and global grassroots projects to address it. They may not be the panacea, but they’re definitely a step in the right direction.

There is a battle to be waged.

For years, the T-shirt worn by 10,000 CROP Hunger walkers in Charlotte, NC (the nation’s largest CROP Hunger Walk) read: “Charlotte Hunger-Fighter.” I remember that some found the slogan too bellicose. At the time, I agreed; but I’ve changed my mind.

If ever there was a war worth fighting it is this war on hunger!

Chogyam Trungpa, a Buddhist teacher, speaks of the “spiritual warrior’s tender heart of sadness;” a heart of steel, emboldened, yet so open, so exposed, so caring and so sensitive that it would notice if a tiny mosquito landed on it.

“It is this tender heart of the warrior,” he instructs, “that has the power to heal the world.”

There is no doubt in my mind that together we possess the ability to heal a broken world - this hungry and suffering world that, more than it ever has, sits just outside of our gates.

Author, Joe Moran, is Regional Director for the Southeast USA for the international humanitarian agency, Church World Service (CWS). Before joining CWS he lived in Latin America for 10 years working in rural development. He lives in Durham, NC.