You wouldn’t think …

It would be hard to give away food to children in a starving country, but it turns out that it was. At lunch each day in the school cafeteria, the cooks dish up HUGE plates of beans and rice and the special sauce of the day. We watched day after day as kids who were at school to work on cleanup and maintenance projects ate about half of their plate, then scrape the rest into a big container. And most of us couldn’t even remotely finish a whole plate! We wondered what was happening with the leftovers. After a while we confirmed that workers were taking those leftovers home to feed their animals. While we all certainly appreciate the animals’ need to eat, it just seemed the height of absurdity that animals were getting our leftovers while there are a hundred children within a half mile radius of the school who don’t get enough to eat every day. We decided to start collecting the leftovers and then inviting the neighborhood children in for a meal. Good idea, right? Well, we made a few critical miscalculations. All of the leftovers ended up in one bowl (even though we DID ask people to scrape what they wouldn’t eat off their plate before they started eating) and we brought the bowl out to serve in lots of little bowls to the kids. Therein lay the problems. First, it looked to some people like we were serving all the scraps from plates AFTER people had eaten. Second, it’s considered somewhat uncivilized to eat rice out of a bowl here. Bowls are for soup or cereal, rice is served on plates. So on our first effort at feeding hungry kids, we ended up instead with some angry, offended parents. Not what we were going for.

Your first reaction to this story may be outrage – and it was definitely many people’s first reaction here too. How could these parents of hungry children be so foolish as to turn down perfectly good food? Can “beggars” really be choosers? No wonder this country’s so screwed up if people will let something so minor as bowls vs. plates get in the way of feeding their children? I think there’s some merit in all of those arguments, but this experience was also an incredibly important reminder about basic human dignity. No matter how poor and desperate a person is, she has the right to defend her own dignity – however she chooses to define that, even if I think it’s absurd. And if she perceives that our gift of food – no matter in what spirit it was offered – was presented in a way that disrespects her and her children, then she absolutely has the right to refuse it. It feels kind of gross to us – entitled, arrogant, ungrateful – but would you let your children eat food that you thought had been thrown away? Of course not.

So after our hurt feelings subsided a bit, we went back to the drawing board. Instead of serving the food from one big bowl, we plated it ahead of time, and made sure that each plate looked nice. Instead of just inviting the children in, Christina went to their parents first – and she wisely chose the ones who had made the biggest fuss last time – to make sure they understood that these were leftovers taken off plates before people ate rather than after. Since our first failed attempt, every afternoon for the past two weeks we have fed about thirty children lunch. They come in together, sit down, share plates, drink as much clean water as they want, the big ones help the little ones eat, and then they help clean up before going to play at the playground. We haven’t figure out how this will work logistically once school starts, but at least we know now that we can do it, and that our efforts are appreciated by the children and their families.

Community organizing 101: you need to actually get the community involved in the organizing, or it might not be appreciated the way you think it should be! And if at first you don’t succeed … go back to the drawing board!