Later, as I left to go home to try to prepare a balanced dinner for my family, I saw him sitting by the side of the house crying softly to himself, flies swarming over his dirty little body.

They were the same ages as my children. I could have been that mother unable to help my children. Carlos could have been my son; Margarita my daughter dying of hunger. My heart was broken with one of the millions of cases that break the heart of God each day.

I can tell you today that approximately 28 people die every minute in our world for lack of food. I know that approximately 21 of them are children.

And yet I cannot imagine 21 children every minute dying. My mind cannot grasp the fact. But I held Margarita in my arms. I knew Carlos personally. The day I met them, I knew I would never be the same again. Suddenly the statistics of the world were not numbers. They were people!

So we took food to them but the next day they were hungry again---and the next. "God!" I called out in my confusion, trying to deal with what I was experiencing, "Why are these people poor? What can we do to change their situation?"

Why Are They Poor?

And then one day God answered my question. We received an invitation to visit a church in the banana zone down near the Panamanian border. We drove on a small dirt road over the high Hill of Death, down its steep sides and on into the banana fields. For miles we drove through a giant plantation of bananas as far as the eye could see. A railroad crossed the little road. Several freight cars were parked on the tracks. Families of the workers were living in the cars. It was easy to move the train throughout the vast plantation to provide workers to the sections that needed them. Children were playing around the track, some of them with protruding little bellies giving evidence of malnutrition.

We saw the fathers working in the banana fields. And after we arrived in the port town of Golfito, we visited a ship being loaded with huge bunches of bananas. In the hold of the ship workers hurried in carrying loads of bananas which often looked bigger than the men who were bent double under their weight.

One man unloaded his bananas on the stack near me. I saw his tired, listless eyes, his ragged clothes, the sweat streaming down the wrinkles of his face. And then I saw a sticker on one of the bananas in the stack he left. In the dim light of the ship's hold, I bent over the bananas and read "Chiquita."

Chiquita bananas are regularly on the shelves of the grocery store in my hometown, population 900, in rural Alabama!

But I had never stopped to think how much it cost some one to get them to us. How am I connected to the exhausted man who daily works long hours loading bananas and then does not receive a wage sufficient to feed and house his family?

How often I have eaten the bananas and been glad that I could buy them cheaper than apples and other fruit grown in my country. But that day I suddenly understood why bananas were cheaper than apples.

We often hear people say how much God has blessed us in the United States with so many material advantages. We have more than any country in any time in history has ever had. But that moment I realized that not all the things we call material advantages are blessings from God. Some of them are things we have taken from the poor across the world. I was devastated when I saw the truth.

Why were they starving? Costa Rica has a great climate that could grow food for their own people. But many of the people cannot get access to the land. Why could Margarita's and Carlos' father not find work?

Can we stop to ask why the Central American countries are called the banana republics? Why are they locked in poverty, hunger and violence? Vast lands in Central America are owned by multinational corporations growing cash crops to export to the rich countries of the world, while many Central Americans themselves are hungry and landless.

I arrived too late to save Margarita's life. But I knew God was speaking to me through this family. How could I help them? Give them food--a handout? Yes, I did that, but that was not enough. Tomorrow they would still be hungry. Should I work to change unjust global economic structures that keep people like Carlos' father from a job, from land, from food? Is that too much, too far away, too complicated, too impossible for someone like me? It would be easier to give a piece of bread, a dollar, a thousand dollars and feel I've helped the hungry.

But God will not let me turn back to that more innocent and ignorant time in my life. God gave me a friend whose baby died in my arms --- a statistic of starvation. And then there was that moment in time when I looked into the desperate face of a banana worker and saw his soul and my own tied together in a common destiny. I must answer God's call to try to change unjust situations! Spirit of God! Please show us the way!

"The cries of those who gather in your crops have reached the ears of God, the Lord Almighty."
--- James 5: 4

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