A letter from Doug Orbaker in Nicaragua
August 2012
The Hunger Games
I've seen several people here in Nicaragua reading The Hunger Games, so I decided to go see the movie. I was not as impressed as some people are. But this really isn't a movie review; it is about the real-life hunger games that are played out every day in Nicaragua and many other countries around the world as the poor struggle for their lives. These games aren't as technologically exciting, but they are sometimes just as much a long-term struggle of life and death.
I came to see one of these hunger games a few years ago when I worked with a group of nurses who were doing physical exams of the kids in a small school here in Managua. I was translating for the nurse who was examining a boy about 7 or 8 years old. He was running a high fever. The nurse asked how long he had had the fever, and he answered “about two weeks.” Conversations with the teachers confirmed this—he had been sick for about two weeks, but still coming to school, although most of the time he slept at his table and didn't play with the other kids. He was not feeling well.
The nurses were incensed. What kind of mother would let her son go for two weeks with a fever like that? Why did the teachers let him continue to come to school where he might infect other kids?
As we began looking deeper, however, a different story began to appear. The boy was one of five children. The father had left several years ago with a younger woman, and the mother worked selling tortillas in the market. She worked seven days a week, selling tortillas from early morning till mid-afternoon, then using some of the money to buy more corn. She then returned to the house, where she worked until 10:00 or 11:00 each night making tortillas to sell the next morning. Each day she hoped to make enough money to feed herself and her five children for the next day.
The nearest of the government-operated health centers where the boy could have received care is several miles away, and the lines are always out the door. Everyone knows that a visit to the health center will take at least a full day, and then there may (or may not) be the medicine the child needs. She might leave with a prescription that she doesn't have the money to fill.
That is the real-life hunger game! How does a mother play off the illness of one child against the food for that boy and four siblings? Like the subjects in the movie, she was forced into the impossible choice of one of her children against the others. In this case, it didn't turn out to be a life-or-death choice, but if those nurses had not visited at that time it might have been. How can a mother make a choice like that? What kind of evil world system puts women into the place of having to make such choices?
Sometimes whole communities or groups of people are forced into choices like this. We have worked a lot in one of the mountainous areas of northern Nicaragua. The water for the larger communities near the bottom of the mountains comes from springs in the areas above. This worked well for a long time, because not very many people lived up on the hillsides, and those who were there grew mostly coffee, which doesn't require cutting all of the forest or tilling the soil. However, over the years, the families who live up there have grown. Children have been born, young people have gotten married and built little places near the parents, and now there are more children. The small areas that were cleared to grow corn and beans now can't provide enough and the families are clearing larger patches of land.
The clearing of land, however, has serious effects on the quality of water downstream. Sometimes the streams overflow with muddy water and the water comes out of the pipes downstream just as muddy. Other times the flow is greatly reduced. There aren't as many trees there to hold back the water.
There is the real-life hunger game. How does a group of people play off the supply of food for some against the quality of water for others? Which group gets to eat? Which group gets drinkable water? How can a community make a choice like that? What kind of evil world system puts communities into the place of having to make such choices?
The movie version of The Hunger Games ends up with the oppressive authorities who have forced young people into the kill-or-be-killed situation changing the rules when the final two “contestants” decide to commit suicide together rather than try to kill each other. The oppressors want to have their “winner” to make into a make-believe folk hero. They have to have a winner.
The real-life hunger games often don't have winners, just survivors—weakened by their struggle and surviving as best they can. Our work at CEPAD is not just filling in the gaps left by such horrible choices. It is helping communities and the people within them develop new ways of living in the world so that people aren't forced into such choices. CEPAD works to help communities develop and to help individual men and women find better ways of feeding and caring for their families without damaging the environment.
Who has enough food? Who doesn't? Who has clean safe water? Who doesn't? Why? Why not? What is our response as Christians? These are some of the real-life questions the world faces, not the fantasy questions of The Hunger Games.
Doug Orbaker
The 2012 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 11
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