New Year Greetings and Sharing from Guideposts

A Hunger of the Soul He was a reporter. Objective. Detached. But this was one story he couldn't let go of. By Roger Thurow, Chicago, IL

Let me tell you about an African woman named Leonida Wanyama. For Christmas dinner her family had boiled bananas. That’s all there was. In the hills of western Kenya, Christmas comes during the dry season when fall harvests are often already depleted. Farm families live on tiny portions of corn, tea, bananas, sweet potatoes, beans and a few vegetables. Babies cry with hunger. Children’s eyes dull with exhaustion. It happens every year. Here, as in so many parts of Africa, farmers, the women and men who grow the food, go hungry. Except that this year Leonida Wanyama vowed that things would be different. A neighboring farmer had told her that an American organization called One Acre Fund was looking for farmers willing to try something new. If the farmers agreed, One Acre Fund would supply them with hardy seeds, a bit of fertilizer, credit to pay for it and classes teaching modern farming methods. “They promise you will grow more than you have ever grown,” the farmer told Leonida. Leonida is a woman of faith. She leads the choir at her village church. She prayed about the farmer’s offer Feeding Africa and studied her Bible. She came to this passage in Exodus: “I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Was this offer from One Acre Fund God’s deliverance from a lifetime of hunger? Leonida didn’t know. She decided to trust anyway. I met Leonida for a very simple reason. My life, too, was changed by a verse from Scripture. Though in my case the verse was from Matthew: “For I was hungry and you gave me food.” Those words gripped me the moment I read them. I’m not sure why.

I grew up in a place vastly different from Lutacho, Kenya. I was raised in Crystal Lake, Illinois, outside Chicago—the heartland, where modern farming methods have produced harvests that are the envy of the world. Teachers at my Lutheran grade school made us memorize Bible verses. That verse from Matthew planted itself in my heart like a seed. For a long time the seed lay dormant. I became a journalist, traveling the world covering stories. In 2003 I landed in Ethiopia to report on a famine for The Wall Street Journal. I walked into an emergency medical tent filled with severely malnourished children. A farmer was there with his five-year-old son. Just one year earlier the farmer had carried surplus sacks of grain to sell at market. Now he carried his starving son to this feeding tent. His son weighed 27 pounds. I stared into the boy’s eyes. Emptiness stared back at me. For I was hungry.... I left that tent struggling to understand how such misery could exist in the twenty-first century, in a world bursting with food. How could a farmer, a person who brought food out of the ground...be hungry? For the complete article, go to Guideposts