When starvation causes more than hunger: ONE solution

Compassion fatigue has taken hold.  Pictures of starving children no longer have the shock value they did in 1985.  How do you reach people in prosperous countries?  How do you make us sit up and take notice?  So many causes are clamouring for support or funding, it's hard to know which one to choose.  I've been disappointed by the apparent lack of progress in improving conditions in the Third World, and in recent years have only supported emergency appeals.

And somehow I'd always assumed that once the famine was over, people would return home and get on with their lives.  It never occurred to me that the effects of malnutrition and starvation could be lifelong and life-changing and affect the brain as well as the body, until I read this from the ONE campaign:

Poverty means parents can’t feed their families enough nutritious food, leaving children hungry and malnourished. Malnutrition leads to irreversibly stunted development and shorter, less productive lives. 

This year, 178 million children, more than twice the number of children in the United States, will reach their 3rd birthday stunted. Their brains and bodies will never fully recover.

Their brains? I never knew that brain damage was a consequence for some children.  And of course I'm very familiar with brain damage.  Because that's what happened to my daughter.

I try not to wonder how Smiley would be if things were different.   I try not to imagine her as a 'normal' teenager: queuing and shivering outside the teen discos in a short skirt.  Listening to music I hate on her iPod.  Sleeping in till noon.  Oh how I wish she did all these things.  But she has always been the way she is.  And always sweet and smiley and a delight.  I look at my daughter: the cause of her brain damage unknown.  I used to torture myself and go over and over what might have gone wrong.  Was it the sprained ankle I got running around the playground?  Or the day-old milk I put in my coffee in the office?  Or the champagne I drank the night she was probably conceived?  It certainly wasn't lack of food.  She isn't starving now, nor is that likely to happen.

But how many mothers - and fathers - sit hopelessly in the hot African sun with their starving children, knowing, as they surely must, that even if their children survive, they may never be the same again.  That they may never reach their full potential.  All those children who were once future scientists, engineers, artists, writers, even politicians, may now have a different life.

Some people are trying to effect real changes to the lives of children, to prevent the lifelong effects of lack of food, including One.org, which I have been supporting for the past year.   I hope that you will too.  They are not looking for money, just for your help in raising awareness. 

ONE is a grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa, by raising public awareness and pressuring political leaders to support smart and effective policies and programs that are saving lives, helping to put kids in school and improving futures.

For more information and posts about ONE please head over to Mummy From the Heart who is now a Mum ambassador for ONE.org.