Winds of Peace Foundation

Steve Sheppard | November 30, 2009

I mentioned in my last entry here that I had become infected with a serious disease, and that I was certainly not resting very comfortably during this holiday season.  The infection has been an attack on my conscience, my sense of justice, my very soul, as I come to terms to with the utter shame that we have brought upon ourselves in the face of a pandemic that grips our world.  it’s not the swine flu.  It’s hunger and starvation.  In the ninety minutes during which I sat at Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday, more than 1,500 people around the world died of hunger or hunger-related disease.  Preventable. Stoppable.  Shameful.

So in my fever I try to imagine what to do, how to get my arms around this infection that won’t leave me alone, how to know how I should act.  Do I ignore the symptoms and hope that they go away?  Should I be asking for some magic pill?   Is this something my chiropractor or some other doctor can fix?  More likely, is there some sort of home remedy?  These questions lead me to this blog entry and those to follow in the days to come.  In search of answers for my own disease, I wonder what others would do?  And so I have decided to pose the question in hopes of obtaining real answers or, at least, spurring your own thinking sufficiently to inoculate you against the worst of the infection’s symptoms: apathy.   I hope you can help me get better.

What if the world was much smaller than it is today, and that the entire population numbered only 100?  This is one of the questions raised by the anti-poverty organization, One.  It has compiled some interesting statistics about our imaginary world demographics.  For instance, of our one-hundred people, eighty would live in substandard housing.  Fifty would be malnourished.  Thirty-three would have no access to safe water.   Thirty-three would be living on only 3% of the total wealth of the world; five people would control 33% of it.  One person would have AIDS.  And one of us would be dying from starvation. 

In such a world, the chances are pretty good that you know each and every member of it.  (Think of your current circle of friends and acquaintances; it’s probably greater than a hundred people.)  And with such a familiarity, the face of that starving individual is known to you.  The individual is known to you.  You see all that he/she is, all that he/she can be.  And you experience his/her pain because he/she is one of you.   So here is the first of my questions: what would you be willing to do? 

It’s not a philosophical or theoretical question.  It’s life-and-death in the moment even if we choose not to see it.  We are collectively insulated from much of the world’s hunger because it is buried in statistics that have no names or faces.  But when we are forced to confront it in the face of a friend or family member, hunger takes on a much different meaning: there is almost nothing we would not do to feed a starving friend; you know that you have sufficient food for both of you. 

In reality, of course, the world is far bigger than one hundred souls.  But then, the world’s resources are more plentiful than in our fictional example, too.  In both cases, the resources are sufficient to feed the hungry, and therein lies the shame.  How do the remaining ninety-nine survivors in our example look at one another in the eye after one of us has died without cause, within our capacity to have helped?

My own exposure to this disease has been heightened by numerous visits to a very unhealthy place, Nicaragua.  But the main threat from disease there is not malaria or dengue fever.  It’s the disquieting realization that hunger is taking the energy and life from people without cause.  Some are people I have been getting to know.   That’s a disease which can create irreparable harm to one’s heart….

It’s a very real question worth pondering, especially during this season of thanks and giving:  what would you do?

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Steve Sheppard | November 22, 2009

I had the inspiring and infuriating experience of reading Roger Thurow’s book, Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, as well as hearing him speak, all within the past week.  If you dare to read his work and hear his stories, be prepared to become infected with “a disease of the soul,” as he describes it.

Thurow is an award-winning jounalist for the Wall Street Journal who has compiled very personal, human stories of hunger which he and his co-author, Scott Kilman, have chronicled over the years from their visits to some of the poorest areas in the world.   Their book is an intense and enraging collection of contributions to WSJ over recent years, stories of famine, suffering, bureaucracy, self-interests and starvation in an age when food is sufficient to feed the world.  It is also an inspiring work, holding up the actions of heroic individuals who will never be known to us nor noted in the passing of the human parade; the work puts very human faces on people who are too often thought of as statistics in far-away lands.  And the authors give us, in the end, hope and calls to action for ending perhaps the greatest shame of human history: our complicit involvement in the unnecessary deaths of 25,000 people every day from hunger or hunger-related disease.

Thurow visited Luther College in Decorah, Iowa to participate in the Upper Midwest Global Poverty Conference on November 21, sponsored by the Luther College One Campaign.  His keynote talk contained many of the stories and much of the wrenching reality of hunger, especially as experienced on the African continent.  As he delved into his experiences, the volume and timbre of his voice changed as the recollections of people met and lives lost became resurrected in his consciousness.  This is a man who has felt the personal loss of individuals whom he has known and cared about.  And he is tormented by the needless loss of human life that held so much potential for good in this world.  As any of us would be, if we just allowed ourselves to truly know this scourge. 

There are many books written about the tragedy of hunger on this planet.  Many posit the enormity of the issue and the numbers of the afflicted.  Few, however, have the ability to reach into the depths of our own conscience and sense of human responsibility as this one.  I encourage and dare anyone to confront this book. 

I am ill tonight, with an infection in my own soul.  But I hope and pray to become better….

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Steve Sheppard | November 2, 2009

Political maneuvering is a human deficit that knows no boundaries, to be sure.  East or West, rich country or poor, man or woman, pale or of color, elected or pundit, left or right, the condition infects us like a virus that has no cure.  Presently, I’m not sure whether I’m more discouraged at the discourse heard within the U.S., where I live, or the antics of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, where I work.    Take your pick.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

If you scrutinize the U.S., you already recognize the issues: health care reform, economic repair, reasons for war, who has influence, our priorities.  Hardly a day passes anymore without some new outrage over postures, slurs and behaviors which, if they were to take place in our schools, might even warrant dismissal or even arrest.  And if you scrutinize some of the latest news from Nicaragua, the behaviors and gamesmanship are at least as disappointing.

For economic reasons, government offices in Managua have been closing at 1:00 P.M. each day.  The officials leave their offices for whatever other endeavors they may have, whether personal or political, but the machinery grinds to a halt.  Keep this in mind.

The empty-office circumstance was not lost on the administration of President Daniel Ortega, who has been maneuvering since his re-election in 2007 to create a change in the election rules of the constitution, to allow him to run for office once again at the end of this term.  He hasn’t been able to capture enough votes in the national assembly for such a drastic change, so he filed the equivalent of a civil rights complaint against the government, claiming that the constitutional edict violates his rights, essentially preventing the population from voting for whoever they want as president.  To press his claim, he needed to present it to the Nicaraguan Supreme Court.  When they reviewed his case, they ruled that a similar issue had already been decided by the court some years ago, and that they would not hear it again.

Now, remember the closed offices?  Late one afternoon in October, long after most offices had been vacated for the day, the Sandinista judges (those loyal to Mr. Ortega) announced a special gathering of the court to review once again the President’s claim.  They served notice to the other judges by sliding the meeting announcements under the vacant office doors.  When it was clear that the more liberal judges would not be present at the court gathering, their chairs were filled temporarily with other Sandinista judges and the outcome, as you might readily guess, was unanimously in favor of Mr. Ortega’s claim.  End result?  He is free to run for the presidency once again, as proclaimed by no less than the “Supreme Court.”  The liberal judges have proclaimed the pronouncement a fraud, and they might have been able to make a good case of it, but for their own use of the very same ploy several years ago on a different issue.

The ultimate losers in these maneuvers are the poor and disenfranchised, shouldering the effects of still more dysfunction and short-sighted self-service.  Is it nonsense?  Of course.  The action even threatens Nicaragua’s recognition as a democratic nation under Organization of American States agreements.  But it’s a graphic example of how people’s character is oftentimes corrupted by the lure and practice of power.  Not unlike what we experience here in the United States, where it has become increasingly more difficult to find leaders in either political party who are not a part of the destructive and dirty games people play. 

We truly ARE more like one another than we are different….

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