DTJ has recently been working on a series of short multi-media pieces about hunger in America, and how children, in particular, are caught up in this mostly invisible crisis. DTJ has partnered with Share our Strength to place faces and stories in front of the statistics and explore our own responsibility to respond.
We have been to New Mexico, Colorado and Arkansas, in schools, boys and girls clubs, parks and homes to see what hunger really looks like in our own backyard.
The result has been shocking.
We have heard children tell us what hunger feels like, what it really feels like. How at night they can’t go to sleep because they feel so much pain and how sometimes they try to sleep to avoid the hunger but can’t sleep because of it. They’ve told us about days when all they eat is what they can get at school and sometimes have to ask the neighbors for their leftovers because mom and dad are too strung out on drugs to provide for them. We have seen refrigerators filled with rotten or expired food and children left questioning why it is that they never get enough to eat.
We’ve also heard children talk about how hard working their parents are but how by the end of the month, there just isn’t anything left. And in the midst of their own recognition of hunger, heard them tell us about who the really needy children are, the ones in Africa, with nothing, “drinking garbage water,” as one child put it.
And the more we have seen, the more responsible we have become. The unacceptability of the hunger crisis in America is too blatant to ignore. To understand more about what hunger means in America see this great info-graphic from GOOD.
We are honored at DTJ to have stepped into the lives of children facing hunger and are eager for you to meet them too.
Watch for DTJ’s multi-media pieces, coming out this fall, about children and hunger in America.
// Photograph taken by Lindsay Branham in New Mexico.