The next pandemic is knocking at our stomachs. Hunger.
While those of us who can afford to buy a newspaper will be waiting to be “surprised” by what the lady of the house has prepared for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, millions of poor people all over the world will have nothing to eat, not even a bowl and plate to hold the food, not a spoon to eat it with.
The reality is that while thousands will be watching their waistlines and “two in every five Filipino adults are obese or overweight,” more of our babies are being born stunted due to their mothers’ malnutrition, drugs or alcohol or cigarettes in their system, and other bad habits like stress and lack of sleep. Milk? Vitamins? Where to get them for mother and child?
Elsewhere, ‘tis Christmas with its horn of plenty and noche buena waits to delight families as many more of the masses wait to be fed three times a day, their condition described as moderately or severely hungry. With Christmas upon us and a pandemic refusing to go away, we are all the more touched by the sight of urban dwellers receiving food from civic groups and kindhearted strangers. The logistics of organizing food drives is enough to give the uninitiate a stomachache and mental indigestion, yet they struggle on, hunting for philanthropists, colleagues and kindred spirits to tap – with near miraculous results, like Jesus feeding 5,000 with five fishes and two loaves of bread.
You’ve heard about young people arm-twisting their “victims” to collect so many thousand kilos of dried fish and so many million pesos worth of rice, water and canned goods, and still the work goes on, it never ends, they never stop. Neither does our admiration, such that those of us fence-sitters can only wonder, how do they do it? Of the lot, alumni orgs apparently have had lots of practice, like 10 years, that they breeze through the exercise without a crease on their shirts and a wrinkle on their shoes.
Food for thought from former Ateneo de Manila University president Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, SJ: “It’s enough if each of us feed one, or two.” No need to apply logistics, just simple one-on-one charity.
