Yeah, I know. Nobody likes to hear the trite clichés about starving people in the world when they’re having a bad day. I can’t speak for anyone else, but people of my generation have been inundated our whole lives with this kind of thing, from the famine in Ethiopia to those Sally Struthers commercials - “for less than the price of a cup of coffee per day…” It’s not something I’m proud of, but I have to say I’m more than a bit desensitized to this problem.

So I was a bit surprised how much this story bothered me:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.

Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. “When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too,” she said.

I’ve not always been the best provider for my family. A few years ago, we were on food stamps for a while, and received a couple of boxes from a local pantry. We were borrowing money to make rent, and I will freely admit that I was failing in my ability to do all that I could to make ends meet. I was stunned that with a college education and a fairly high level of intelligence, I couldn’t find a decent job. And I kept resisting taking a cashier position at a supermarket to get us by, thinking that if I just kept holding out something better would come along.

Those were hard times for us. It was tough on our marriage. It was a tough life lesson for me. But even if that was my bottom - as low as I had ever been - I never had to feed my family dirt so that they wouldn’t starve.

It kills me that situations like this exist. That there are people in the world today - just off the coast of this great nation, in fact - who can’t afford rice for heaven’s sake. I have twenty pounds of the stuff in a rubbermaid bin in my kitchen. I paid less than $10 for it.

I’m not saying I know how to fix it. And I’m not a bleeding heart going on and on about poverty all the time. But it’s real. These are real people with real lives, and they need help. And I don’t know how to help them.

Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Filed under: World News