Day after...

We had a great Thanksgiving, surrounded by family and friends. Played some pool, ate some turkey, played some more pool, ate some more turkey, played a game of cards, had a cup of coffee with the pumpkin pie... Life was good. Then I don't know how discussion came to the amount of waste in our culture. Which reminds me of a little experience I had in Romania last August:

After meeting with a missionary in Bucharest, and before meeting a real estate agent to look at rentals, I had a few minutes to grab some lunch so I sat at an outdoors cafe and ordered a pizza (which hardly resembles the pizza we're used to here - all thin crust and an invisible layer of cheese on it). Out around the tables I noticed a sad-looking eight or nine year-old paper boy, so I waved him over to get some newspapers to look at the rental section. As he came and I asked him how much the newspapers cost, he gave me one of these answers that no one could ever forget: "Sir, I don't want money for the newspaper, I want some food - I haven't eaten in two days and I am really hungry. Can you please buy me some food?" Wow... There I was, enjoying a good meal and his words punched me out cold and withered my appetite. Under the surface of the world that flashes before us there is a lot of pain and suffering, but we often don't see it because it seldom jumps out right at us. Of course, I got him a big meal to enjoy and left him going away wondering where his parents were and if he had any other siblings. He didn't look like the other glue-sniffing kids I had seen coming out of sewer holes and from below the bridges, but his life was perhaps no better. The glue the others sniff at least numbs the brain, but hunger keeps gnawing at you until satisfied.

-C