Numana started out as late night conversation with  my older sister, Carmen.  Seven years ago.  

Seven years ago I had hair.

We had spent a lot of time feeding starving people in Central America and Africa and were brainstorming ideas to get more people involved in feeding starving people.  We had just visited my good friend Lyle Mullin’s operation in West Virginia (www.hsminc.com) and were impressed with the food packaging program they did and wanted to replicate it in Kansas.

Seven years ago I had a mustache.

It’s been a long seven years full of dreams and disappointments trying to launch Numana – a brilliant name that a marketing company Jajo (www.jajo.net) gave us.  We thought we had our first event scheduled several times only to find out that our timing couldn’t have been worse – I mean, who foresaw the whole world economy tanking?

But because it did, the hunger crisis has only worsened.  The numbers had been 825 million people in the world starving every day.  It has increased 150 million to a staggering 975 million!  Almost a billion people are starving. Today.

Although we’ve been discouraged and disappointed, I always knew that when the right time came to get our first event launched, a bell would sound in my head.  Remember the Rocky movie w here he was getting the ever-living stuffing knocked out of him and suddenly the bell sounded and the fight was one – it was time to conquer.

The bell has sounded It’s time for our first event! This wonderful concept-which is not mine any longer but the result of some committed people around me-is coming of age.

We will have our first event on Dec. 29-30 at the Civic Center in El Dorado, KS.  Our goal is to package 100,000 meals.  Our intent is to send the first container to Haiti, where children are eating mudcakes to fill their tummies.

Come help us.  30 cents a meal gives a child a nutritious meal. You can do it right after Christmas with your family, your church, your civic group, your friends, gosh, we’ll even let you bring your enemies – just let us help you save the starving.

Auburn University is on the cutting edge of developing a systematic approach to engaging all facets of education in the awareness and advocacy issues surrounding global hunger. Dr. June Henton and Dr. Harriet Jiles have founded this organization with the backing of the United Nations. The World Food Programme, which is a department of the U.N. has supplied a visiting professor, Dr. Doug Coutts, to start an inter-collegiate curriculum of hunger studies. They will host a Hunger Summit on the campus of Auburn University on Feb. 27-Mar. 1. For more information and to register, go to: www.universitiesfightingworldhunger.org

When I was a kid, we were all quite enamored with the Little Rascals mainly because Darla was, what the youth would call nowadays, a little “hottie.” There was the whiny Alfalfa, with his hair parted down the middle and a little spike at the end, and then Spanky, the cherub faced little master of mayhem. Their club was called “The He-man, woman-haters club.” Ha. They were all in love with Darla and we knew it.
People like clubs and there are all sorts to belong to. But one that I have joined that I think has done an absolutely marvelous job in the world is the Rotary Club. They have almost single-handedly stamped out polio. Everywhere they go, people get fed, water wells get drilled, sick people are treated, and a host of other wonderful things. Check them out: www.rotary.org. And if you know a Rotary Club member, thank them for making the world a better place to live!

I have been captured by someone I’m convinced is from outer space, like, for example, a place called heaven. The world as I knew it and assumed I could speak of its reality no longer exists thanks to this recent ambush. And this little person who abducted me came from that same planet you see on the commercial where everything was in black and white, then, in an instant, everything changes to technicolor and birds sing “Zip-a-dee-do-dah, Zip-a-dee-ay, My, oh, my, it’s a wonderful day!”

Just so you know in case you want to send ransom money, my abductor is a six pound, eleven ounce, 19 1/4” long blue eyed beauty going by the alias of Cailyn Joy McNary. I say it’s an alias because she’s really too beautiful for her real name to be of this earth. She’s got to have an angelic name that Someone is keeping from us. But we’ll happily call her Cailyn Joy until the angels reveal their secret.

I was warned that the journey from father to grandpa was better than any trip I had ever made before and I’d never want to go back. And now that I’ve gone over to the other side, so to speak, I wonder why I didn’t do this decades earlier.

I’m an emotional mess. How could I possibly love someone so much that I hadn’t even known a week earlier? How could I possibly go to work each day and not be able to concentrate because I missed her so much? And it was just four days earlier she was a figment of imagination living lovingly inside my daughter-in-law? For crying out loud! How could those blue eyes melt me and she can’t even speak!

I paused to take a break while yesterday and sat staring at the wall wondering what she was doing. Was she eating okay? Was her Daddy holding her or her Mommy? What was she wearing? Was she warm? Was her diaper okay? Did she miss me, too?

Good grief. I’m a mature, responsible adult that ought to be in better control.

But I’m not. I’m toast. Wasted. Undone. Abducted. Ambushed. Smitten. Ravished.

And she doesn’t have a clue how much she is loved.

And neither do I most of the time.

Until times like these and God reminds me, as I feel a love that is has so mysteriously appeared and captured me, that this is the way He feels about me all the time.

He just likes to give me these beautiful occasions when He lets me feel about someone like He feels about me.
How awful to ever have to watch one starve.
Unbelievable, unexplainable, life-changing love.
By the way, the address to send ransom money to is: Box 572, El Dorado, Ks. Make it to the attention of: Cailyn Joy McNary.

Dr. Doug Coutts is a professor at Auburn University and was sent there by the United Nation’s ‘World Food Programme” to start a hunger-issue curriculum across the various disciplines and colleges. This is vanguard stuff as he works with Drs. June Henton and Harriet Jiles of Auburn who have started “Universities Fighting World Hunger.”
Dr. Coutts has lived the vast majority of his professional career abroad working with the World Food Programme. He is a wonderful man with a passion and ability to articulate global issues of hunger. One piece of advice that he gave me was this: “Whatever you do to eliminate hunger, it must always be coupled with building capacities in that country.”
So just feeding hungry people, while it is a great and noble thing, is not good enough if there is not some long term strategies involved to insure the next generation doesn’t need helping being fed, too. That’s why we are so excited about our food getting into school feeding programs in foreign countries. A child will go to school if they know they can eat. A parent will send their child to school for the same reason. And a child learns to read and write, and capacities are built. It is the most effective way of ending hunger there is available.

We typically think of insecurities as something emotional we feel because of fear. For example, we would say that a certain person who is shy in public is insecure in themselves.
But when you talk about hunger issues on a global scaled, the term “Food insecurities” is a phrase that is often used to describe the ripple effect of people not having enough food to feed themselves or their family. So not having enough food leads to an insecure and unstable family environment, a community environment, and ultimately, a national environment. For example, before all the hurricane hit Haiti, there wasn’t enough food to go around so that insecurity led to people rioting and deposing the leader. So global hunger does effect us even in our nation because when other nations are at unrest, it is typically, though not always, over economic conditions which has hunger as a core issue. So us in the U.S. feeding the world does help to stabilize our global security.

I have another girl that rocked my world! I became a grandpa for the first time on Saturday. Cailyn Joy McNary weighed 6 lbs, 11 oz.

My New Granddaughter

The Girl That Rocked My World

This is Maria, the little Nicaraguan girl that rocked my world a few years ago and changed the direction of my life. You can read about the story in a previous blog, “Desperate Housewives.”

My friend, Romona Baker, of Springfield, MO, wrote this about an experience she had in Nicaragua.  

Girl with Purple Plate
Just about a year ago I was behind my video camera in a Rainbow Network children’s lunch center in Nicaragua. Children came to eat in the dim little shack made from old, weathered boards and stayed for the afternoon school run by volunteer teachers. Most of the beautiful, dark-eyed, ragged children were caught up in the excitement of our troop of visiting, white-skinned tourists with water bottles, fanny packs, silly hats and cameras. It was hard for me to capture the pathos of the hungry children distracted by the sideshow.

Then I saw her, the little girl who paid no attention to the Americans. She was only interested in the contents of her plate. The light was from behind her, layering shadows on her face as she scooped up each heaping spoonful, hardly chewing the last. I watched through the camera, as she chased the last bits of rice around her plate. My tears made it hard to see what I was filming as she raised her plate and licked off the last residue. In my mind, I still see the light shining through that purple plate and her dark eyes looking at me over its edge. When I watched the video later, I witnessed again the magical details. Her tongue curls as it sweeps the moisture left on the plate. When she finally lowers it, still looking through the camera straight into my eyes, the shiny surface reflects purple light across her face.
Even amateur photographers like me recognize those as once in a lifetime, Kodak moments. Yet for me the haunting mental image represents the hundreds of children in Nicaragua I have seen cleaning their plates of every last morsel. Even my imagination and the photos of world photographers are not sufficient to translate my experience to comprehending the hunger present in other countries.

In Springfield, Missouri, where I live, there are 11,000 children who attend the public elementary schools. In the world, there are 16,000 children who die each day because of a lack of food.

Girl Licking a Purple Plate

I used a quote in my previous post about “Trying to change the world without any demonstrable proof of our success.” While I can’t find that exact spot in the book, I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Walter Wink who wrote the original thought. I read it probably twenty years ago but it has stuck with me since because idealists, who long to see food in each person’s tummy, have to be encouraged in their work when surrounded by the reality that hunger is only worsening with this troubled global economy. I believe it is worth our efforts to struggle for the way things should be rather than to be complacent with the way things are.