The Blessing of a Full Stomach

Our team from the US had been in Chwele, in Western Kenya for several days, in partnership with the Chwele Community Center and at the invitation of Paul and Grace Kuto. We eagerly awaited the arrival of the Kenya Keys team from Taru. Soon after their arrival, our Taru team moved through the dinner line at the Chwele Community Center. Food in abundance. Variety. Colors. Smells. Things grow happily in this land of steady rainfall, where the corn doesn’t struggle against all odds to poke its way through the hard, dry earth. And you can see the difference in the faces of the people.The men of the Taru team stacked their plates high, an unaccustomed opportunity to eat heir fill and then some. In Taru, like their students and their children, they eat what’s available, often wishing there was more. Grateful if there is something. Hunger a common stalker at the door.Seeing them load their plates reminded me of a time many years ago—1992, to be exact, when I’d gone to Romania with a medical team. The “wall” had just fallen. The megalomaniacal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife had recently been assassinated. The countless orphanages dotting Romania had been exposed to the outside world, exposing the horrors of the regime in the empty faces of these children. Masses of them. Our team had come to teach local surgeons, in hopes they could then perform much-needed surgeries on these children that had been labeled the “irrecoverables.”We had the weekend off and were headed to Transylvania to see “Dracula’s castle” and other famous sites in the lush forest. Christina, the woman who had worked closely with me as my interpreter, was coming too, and bringing her 10 year-old daughter, Alexandra. We traveled the countryside, our team, Christina, and Alexandra—a silent child. It was a lovely hiatus from the demands and sorrows of the work we’d been immersed in. When our venture was over, I asked Christina what Alexandra had liked the best, thinking she would name a certain castle, or being able to ride on a bus or stay in a hotel.Christina looked at me and said, “She loved having her stomach full for a whole weekend.”Stunned, I was reminded of my naiveté, my uninformed assumptions—my lack of really understanding how hunger rules out all else. And how the feeling of a full stomach, which I take for granted, is such a rare and ultimate satisfaction for people who live with the hollow, gnawing, aching pain of emptiness.I thought of Christina, and of Alexandra, who is now grown, as I watched the Taru team move through the food line. How many of them, after this training is all done, would say the highlight of their time in Western Kenya was having a full stomach, day after day?On returning home, I was stunned by an article I read in the newspaper about a new device the FDA has approved to counter obesity. It’s called AspireAssist. A tube is implanted in the patient’s stomach, then connected to a valve that the patient can open 30 minutes after a meal and drain the stomach contents into a toilet. A new method of weight control. Simple. You eat what you want, then you flush it.My world often leaves me speechless. Alexandra and Taru friends, I hope you don’t hear about this.