Using Hunger as a Measure of Success

Success can be a goal, a milestone, or simply an elusive notion. To be sure, success is fleeting as a shadow, as difficult to grasp as keeping water in one’s hand. There are many markers to denote success: trophies, diplomas, homes in the mountains or by the sea, luxury cars in the garage and perhaps a yacht in a marina or a private plane in some airport hangar. Many work an entire lifetime and never quite achieve the sweetness of succeeding.
For them, like a butterfly, it may be one more million dollars, yet another deal made to put outrageous wealth within reach, a nice office with a view and their own parking space. Yes, success means many things to many people, but I never heard of success being expressed in the following manner: The least number of days a mission was unable to feed hungry children.
Ralph Johnson, a contractor and member of First United Methodist Church, Court House recently traveled with a church team of construction-talented men to Bayonnais, Haiti. He related about time spent in that Caribbean nation at International Christian Development Mission. It was not his first visit, nor the first of the team to that place.
What Johnson said that hit like a ton of bricks was stated by Yvan Pierre, director, about ICDM in the past year. Imagine, to measure success by the least number of days when there was no food for poor children at the school. Looking at the mission’s website, one of its mandates is to provide food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and clothing for the destitute, education for children, literacy training for adults and clean drinking water.
Johnson also related when he and Rich Wheaton, another team member, were riding to pick up supplies, a Haitian looked at him and made a hand motion across his throat. Here, such a motion would mean “kill” or “you’re dead!” Afraid to relate the incident to Pierre until later, Wheaton and the team learned that motion across the throat, in Haiti, means “I am hungry.” It was small relief to the men, who realized they were not being threatened, but rather made aware of a condition; many of us cannot fully comprehend.
As the team labored with assistance of locals from the Bayonnais area, they realized these were not lazy folks, as many envision those in other Caribbean nations. They were eager and willing to learn construction and other skills, but lacked tools.
Johnson then told of how the group, on a previous trip, worked with hacksaws cutting rebar. (That’s a steel rod used to reinforce concrete and masonry.) There are cutting machines that hasten the mason’s task, which Johnson likened to being as common for a mason as a circular saw for a carpenter. Someone sent one of those devices to the mission. However, no one showed the natives there how it worked. Johnson noted he saw a group trying to bend the rebar, without knowing how much easier the work would be using the machine. He walked over and casually demonstrated the operation to their amazement and delight.
One of the comments Johnson made was that of the poverty that grips many in that nation. Still, he said the children who attend the school there walk, some up to two hours, to attend, and are clothed in clean clothes. They are eager to learn, since education equips them for a better future.
Then his words returned about success and having the least number of days to feed those hungry children.
Some of the people there, regardless of their poverty and life in a nation that is among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere are thankful for what they have, and are willing to share from their meager stores with strangers. As Johnson was told by Pierre, “We will give you the best that we have.” What that was, he added, was not much meat, but a tasty mixture of vegetables. Not much, by American standards, but the meals were served with gratefulness. As anyone knows, appreciation means more than money in so many cases.
So we will put aside this column. We will focus on pressing things in our lives, like preparing for Thanksgiving. In all likelihood most of us will have more food before us at that one meal than many of those Haitian children’s families will have for a week or longer. It is altogether imaginable that we will throw away more good food that day than those Haitians would have eaten in at least a few days.
Success is measured, at least by returning team members, in the walls and doors they put in place, and experiences they had with the Haitians. They are more grateful now for the simple things, the running water in their homes, the medicines that make them healthy, the simple tools they used to take for granted, and will no longer think the same way.
What is your measure of success? Has it anything to do with least number of days having food for children?
Those inclined to assist the mission may visit its website: www.icdm.us.