Read This Book

I just finished reading an amazing book called The Diary of Ma Yan. It's the real diary of a thirteen-year-old girl living in a rural area in China, that was published after it fell into the hands of a journalist on a rare visit to the region. The area is so arid the government has declared it uninhabitable. About three million people still live there, scratching out a hand-to-mouth existence. Ma Yan describes her struggles to get an education, at a tiny school a 12-mile-walk from her home, and her deep admiration for her parents, whose ceaseless exhausting labor is barely enough to feed the family. She especially admires her mother, who has a serious medical condition that causes her such pain she occasionally sits down moaning in the middle of the wheat field she is harvesting - but the family can't afford to go to a doctor. No matter how hard the parents work, they are just one breath away from starvation. Ma Yan describes trying to concentrate on her studies when the only thing she has had to eat in the past 48 hours is a single bowl of rice.

I was awed and moved by this description. I felt like the discrepancy between this family's situation and our own - which until then I would have rated near the bottom among our circle of friends, since we are living in quite a small apartment with not even a separate bedroom for the baby - was extreme, nearly obscene. I looked around at all the evidence of wealth in our apartment, the Made-in-China baby toys, the fancy artisal organic cheese in the refrigerator that we are able to afford, the overflowing bookcases, the color TV and piles of CDs we hardly even have time to listen to. We have so much food that I complain about eating too much. It made me feel sick to think that I was munching away on blueberry tart while elsewhere in the world, young mothers my age are literally starving.

I can't imagine how all-consuming and horrific it must feel when your children are in real danger of illness and death, when your whole family is really just one catastrophe like an illness or a particularly bad drought away from destitution. It reminded me of the quote: "We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second." (Barbara Kingsolver)

To assuage a bit of my guilt I called up one of those international aid agencies and pledged to sponsor a child in India. I have two other sponsored children, one in Brazil and one in Honduras. It isn't very much money and it only touches a few individual lives - when what we need to address the global disparity in wealth is huge sweeping reforms and changes to the global currents of trade. But I feel slightly better. Mainly I just wanted some family on the other side of the world to feel that they weren't suffering in utter loneliness.