Op-Ed: Think You Know the Face of Hunger? It Looks Like Your Neighbor Too
Hunger in Rwanda and in the U.S. appear quite different on the
surface, but the root causes are strikingly similar.
(Photo: Betta/Getty Images)
May 01, 2014 By Michaela Kupfer

Michaela Kupfer is the Monitoring & Evaluation Fellow with Gardens for
Health International, an organization that partners with families in
Rwanda to provide lasting agricultural solutions to chronic
malnutrition. She has a BA in Anthropology from Washington University
and currently serves as a Global Health Corps fellow.
full bio
We need to reimagine how we think about hunger.
For many people living in the United States, the term evokes the image
of an emaciated African child—flies buzzing around his face, eyes
staring up helplessly. Hunger is something that happens to people over
there, people who have no agency or means to feed their children.
To an extent, this image reflects reality as hunger in sub-Saharan
Africa continues to be a pervasive and stubborn issue. Where I work in
Rwanda, with Gardens for Health International, 44 percent of children
under the age of five are stunted. This means that their physical and
cognitive growth has been irreversibly limited because of chronic
hunger.
But the image of the starving African child is myopic, as it fails to
recognize the millions of Americans living in hunger. Every single
day, one out of every four children in the U.S. goes hungry. Because
of a dearth of healthy food options, this food insecurity contributes
to higher rates of childhood obesity. Seventeen percent of children
between the ages of two and 19 are now overweight.
Hunger in Rwanda and in the U.S. appear quite different on the
surface. But the root causes—lack of knowledge and access to a
nutritious diet—are strikingly similar.
Movies like A Place at the Table have begun the process of painting a
new picture of hunger, one that includes the United States. This
reimagination has the potential to shift national discourse
surrounding the issue—particularly as supporters of the recent SNAP
cuts regularly characterize beneficiaries as lazy and irresponsible.
Their representation excludes devoted mothers like Barbie Izquierdo,
whose struggle to find a well-paying job, work toward college, and
feed her children was featured in A Place at the Table.
Our short-sightedness has a ripple effect. "I always thought food
insecurity and hunger were just things that happened in these poor
African places," says Naomi Musabyimana, a health educator at Gardens
for Health International, where she trains mothers on how they can
improve the health of their children. Her views have changed since
watching A Place at the Table.
Just a few years ago, however, Musabyimana's own children were
suffering from malnutrition in Rwanda, where they live. Like
Izquierdo, Musabyimana at times would find herself crying because her
children were hungry and she had nothing to feed them. At some points,
she lost the hope that she would escape the situation she was living
in.
Then in 2010, Musabyimana was connected to Gardens for Health. Through
the education and support that Musabyimana received, she regained a
sense of hope and was able to lift her children out of hunger. She
became a trainer with Gardens for Health, teaching other mothers what
she had learned. Gardens for Health was founded based on the belief
that growing and eating healthy food can—and must—be a part of the
long-term solution to malnutrition. The core program works in
partnership with health clinics in Rwanda to provide the families of
malnourished children with the knowledge, seeds, and support to impact
long-term health.

The danger of the image of the helpless, emaciated African child is
that we underestimate the role parents must have in responding to
malnutrition. What Musabyimana and Izquierdo have in common is more
than a history of hunger: They share the courage to better the lives
of their children despite tremendous challenges. If mothers and other
caregivers are empowered with the tools to address malnutrition, they
can and will do it.
We need to have education on nutrition and other crucial health
issues. At Gardens for Health, the families we work with are enrolled
in an intensive course of trainings, with topics ranging from how to
appropriately wean a child to gender-based violence and its effect on
a family's nutrition.
But empowerment also requires having the resources to put that
knowledge into practice. That means having access to healthy foods.
In the U.S., many people live in food deserts—areas where access to
fresh produce or low-fat meat products is severely limited. Izquierdo
knows that feeding her children canned pasta every night is not
nutritious, but taking multiple buses to a fully stocked grocery store
is not always feasible.
Here in Rwanda, the challenges to accessing a healthy diet are
different. The most prevalent, most affordable food options are
carbohydrates such as potatoes and maize, which don't provide children
with the nutrients they need to be healthy. That is why Gardens for
Health works with families for a year to provide them with the skills,
inputs, and support to maintain home gardens that enable them to
diversify their diets and be their own source of a balanced,
nutritious diet.
When we fail to equip families with the knowledge and resources to
ensure that their children have healthy food, we disrupt children's
potential to thrive. That is something that no family wants and that
no country can afford. It is time for us to set forth a new vision of
who goes hungry and what role we all have to play in confronting
hunger.
To learn more about Gardens for Health International, visit our website.
To meet Naomi Musabyimana and other members of our Rwandan team in New
York City, attend our event on May 1.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/05/01/op-ed-gardens-health
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