I do not remember the first time I saw a starving child.
That is the truth of growing up where I grew up. Children with more bones than flesh were just part of the landscape. On roadsides. At traffic lights. In the periphery of every ordinary day. I did not learn about poverty from a photograph or a charity campaign or a school lesson.
I grew up alongside it. It was just there, the way pavements are there, the way traffic is there, unremarkable because it had always been there and nobody around me seemed to think it required a reaction.
I think that is where the armour starts.
Not with too much feeling. With never being taught to feel it in the first place.
I have spent years now trying to feel it properly. Trying to look at what I grew up walking past and actually see it. This work was supposed to be that.
A way of turning toward the thing I had always been taught to turn away from. And for a while it worked. The photographs landed. The stories broke me open. I would see a child's face and feel it in my chest for days.
And then one day I didn't.
I came across a photograph this week. Uganda, 1980. A boy whose hand had been so destroyed by starvation that the photographer said it almost did not look human. Bone inside skin pulled so tight it barely resembled anything alive.
Resting in the large warm hand of a missionary. Two hands. One full. One emptied by starvation until it became something else entirely.
I looked at it.
And I felt nothing.
Not grief. Not rage. Not even the distant echo of something that used to be there. Just my brain processing an image and filing it away before the feeling could even form.
That terrifies me more than the photograph.
Because if I am here, doing this every single day, and a child's hand that does not look human cannot break through anymore, what does that mean for the rest of the world?
What does that mean for you?
Be honest with yourself for a moment.
Do you still feel these images the way you felt the first one? Or has something built up quietly over years of scrolling, a layer at a time, so gradual you never noticed it forming, that makes the next child a little easier to pass and the one after that easier still?
We grew up alongside this. All of us. In different ways. On different roads. But we have all been learning, our whole lives, that some suffering is just the furniture of the world.
And while we have been learning that, the children have kept starving.
The photographer who took that image in Uganda was ashamed he took it. Won the World Press Photo of the Year and was ashamed of that too. Furious that the publication that sat on it for five months while children were dying entered it into a competition the moment it became convenient.
He never wanted a prize.
He wanted someone to feed the child.
Forty five years later that boy's hand is every child in Gaza right now. In Sudan. In Afghanistan. Different dust. Same starvation. Same world deciding how much it can bear to feel before it looks away.
I am asking you to feel it today.
Not forever. Just today.
Just enough to do something before the armour closes back in.
Because the boy on the roadside I grew up walking past, the one I was never taught to stop for, he is still there. He has always been there. And every meal we deliver into Gaza and Sudan and Afghanistan is the stop I never made as a child finally being made now.
That is what your donation is.
Not charity.
The stop we should have made a long time ago.
For every child whose hand should never have become a photograph,
Hafsa
