authors in action

There is enough

By Valerie Sherrard

There is enough. That’s the thing that’s so disturbing about poverty. Planet earth isn’t poor. There’s more than enough food to go around. There’s more than enough everything. Food, money and resources are all present in abundance. Wealth and plenty flow like water in opulent societies.

There is enough, and yet, children starve. They lay down with hunger and rise up with it. It becomes a cruel and constant companion throughout lives that are cut off all too soon.

In 1994 Kevin Carter brought world hunger to centre stage with his Pulitzer winning photo of a famine-stricken child crawling toward a UN food camp while a buzzard watched in the background.

I cannot see that picture without this thought rising: There is enough.

Carter’s experiences and photographs suggest otherwise. In his suicide note, just months after receiving the Pulitzer, he wrote: “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children …”

Starving children. Who among us could see a starving child without offering help? How then is it that we can be unmoved by this plight when it is shared by so many? Do we need to be confronted, to come face to face with it before we react?

I have no eloquent words to lay down and no wisdom beyond the simple understanding that, if poverty exists when there is enough, it exists, not for lack of food, or the want of wealth but because of a different sort of poverty – a barrenness in the human spirit.

I believe this. I believe that all it would take would be for each of us to do something. To do our part. Countless organizations exist to do the work for us, all we need do is care enough to commit.

If there is want, it is the want of compassion and of the sense of responsibility. There is no other explanation for the desperate plight of families and communities and countries that wither and die because we do not care enough to help, even though there is enough.

There is enough. And yet, there is far, far too little.

Valerie Sherrad is the author of 9 previous titles, including Kate, Sarah’s Legacy, Sam’s Light, and the Shelby Belgarden Mystery Series. Searching for Yesterday is the sixth Shelby Belgarden book. Valerie’s books have been shortlisted for the Red Maple, White Pine, Snow Willow, MYRCA, and Arthur Ellis Awards, recommended by IODE Violet Downey Award, and selected as Our Choice by the CCBC. She lives in Miramichi, New Brunswick, with her husband, Brent.

© 2008 Defining Canada.