Political Quotes

“I have witnessed starvation up close. Many years ago, I was visiting Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying in Calcutta. The room had a series of cots, filled with men. There was a men's side and a women's side, and I was on the men's side. Many of the men, the priest told me, had come after they had reached a point of malnutrition on the streets to which they had then collapsed. I was asked to tend to one young man, and his eyes were very bright, and I asked the priest: It appears like he is really focused. He said: No, no, no. This young man has been starving to death. His body has started to damage its own organs, and there is no recovery. All we can do is minister to his comfort. That involved taking sections of grapefruit and wiping them across his lips. I also visited a refugee center in Juba, in South Sudan, where the children's level of malnutrition was measured by an armband. It is one way of getting a quick sense of how little food they have had. It is called a mid-upper arm circumference. It is color coded, green to yellow to red, so aid workers can quickly see the severity of the malnutrition--the extent, if you will, of the impact of starvation. And I visited refugee camps in Somalia and in Kenya and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where families were fleeing conflict and, quite frankly, fleeing starvation. Starvation is sometimes the result of the chaos of war, sometimes the result of natural disasters, sometimes agricultural disasters.”