Famine

Image via Wikipedia

To me skinny is a four letter word.  I prefer slender.  What does ones body image have to do with famine.  Well I am from Ethiopia, a country in East Africa.  These days the famine that is going on there has been in the news.  Its nothing really new to me.  When I was young and it was the early 80s the news would talk about the famine in Ethiopia.  I was too young to really understand. My mother tells me that I had a solution for famine problem.  Just box up the food that I didn’t want to eat and send it back home to Ethiopia for the starving children to eat.

That was 20 some years ago.  Now the news is showing pictures of similar children dying from starvation.  I had seen it recently and I had to leave the room because it affected me so much.  I wanted to cry for all the people who were traveling hundreds of miles just to get some aid.  I have seen pictures on the internet of those same kids.  So tiny and frail.  I had to take off a group that I used to read on my other blog because I was so sensitive to the images.  One night I even got upset when I went to bed.  I wondered why was I a lucky one to be able to come to a country that was blessed with so much.  Not a lot of people can understand how I feel.  You almost wonder could that have been me or someone I may know.

It took me almost a week to write this entry.  Part of me wanted to express how I felt on the subject.  Part of me wanted to explain how it affected me.  I am just one person.  Do others get affected by the famine the way that I do?  Who knows… who knows.