I’ve come to know Carmen through our visits to the community of El Junco, a remote rural village in Northern Honduras.  Carmen is 24, and the mother of six children.  She is tiny, very thin and has lived all her life in this community.  She lives in a house with dirt walls and floor and an outdoor faucet to supply water for her family.  Chickens run in and out of her house along with the occasional cat.  She has no latrine—the family walks a ways off to a place they have set aside.  Carmen’s husband has a small piece of land that he farms to provide food for his family. 

We visited Carmen and the people of Junco this week.  It is a difficult time.  It was a very dry year and there wasn’t a good harvest.  The people have little land, not enough to sustain their families even in a good year.  They are hungry.  And, two weeks ago, one of the children we weighed previously died (officially) of pneumonia.  But, I know that she also died of malnutrition, unable to fight an infection because of the weakened condition of her body. 

We weighed all the children of the village and chatted with the moms.  It was no surprise that all of Carmen’s children were severely malnouished, in the third and most severe level which is dangerous—life-threatening.  We know that despite all our advice about what to give her children she doesn’t have enough to feed them.  The most severely malnourished is Carmen’s daughter who is three and a half years old and weighs 23 pounds.  She has trouble walking due to weakness.  She is miserably unhappy and cries and clings to her mother constantly.  When I weighed her I though of my granddaughter, Adrienne, in the U.S. who is eight months old, and weighs 24 pounds, more than this three year old. 

Carmen had tried to come to the nutrition center a few months back, but couldn’t stay because her husband depends on her to cook and clean and wash clothes and feed the chickens.  I looked at Carmen holding her four month old baby.  I was suddenly very tired and angry that things were the way they were and I said, “Well, if the nutrition center doesn’t work for you we have to find a different solution, because these are all God's precious children, and we can't just let them starve.”  Carmen looked at me and then looked down as she brushed the tears from her eyes. 

We began to talk again, the women and me.  One of them mentioned that what they needed was work, jobs, but there was nothing in the tiny village of Junco.  I talked about another village where the women had organized and secured loans of $20-$30 to begin small businesses selling food and clothing out of their homes.  I talked about how their lives were changing by having just a little income.  I mentioned that those that sold cheese and milk or beans and rice had a little food in their house that was also available for their children.  “If someone gave you 500 lempiras to start a business, what would you do with it?”  I asked Irma, Carmen’s sister-in-law. 

I was sitting next to Carmen so I heard her speak.  She is so very quiet, meek even.  “I could do that,” she said softly, almost a whisper.  “I wish I could work at a store in my house so we would have enough to eat.”  Her eyes were big as she looked at me, then looked down again.  The others were talking, and didn’t hear her.  But I did.  I heard this young mothers whispered hope for a better life for her children, a profoundly uttered prayer in this seemingly hopeless situation.  A prayer that gives me strength and hope to continue to fight for the lives of her precious children.