By Becca Renk – Aug 3, 2025
1999: Hurricane Mitch aftermath
The image is forever seared in my mind: Francisco was two years old, his thin legs and swollen feet were covered in sores. Straw blond hair stuck to his head as he listlessly nursed from his teenage mother’s breast. He weighed 13.5 pounds.
It was the summer of 1999, and I was weighing babies in Nueva Vida. I’d come to Nicaragua in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch to help in any way I could through the Jubilee House Community and its project in Nicaragua, the Center for Development in Central America (JHC-CDCA).
With its main office located just a mile down the road from the largest Hurricane Mitch resettlement camp in the country, the folks at the JHC-CDCA were busy. Nine months after the hurricane, the 12,000 people in Nueva Vida—who had been moved from Managua’s flooded lakeshore—were still sleeping on the ground in black plastic tents. There were water spigots throughout the camp where families could haul water for cooking and washing and electricity was connected to the tents via a spiderweb of pieced-together barbed wire.
Mitch’s malnutrition
Families had lost their sources of income—many had been fishermen in the lake, or dug through Managua’s trash to find recyclables to sell. In Nueva Vida, there was no lake and no dump.
Without work, there was never enough to eat. Aid trucks from the big humanitarian organizations had stopped coming—undoubtedly moved on to the next disaster—and families were left struggling to put food in their kids’ mouths.
We’d been meeting with the leadership emerging from the chaos that was Nueva Vida in the early days, and a list of priorities for the community had been drawn up. Top on that list was a health clinic—at that time, Nicaragua’s neoliberal government had essentially privatized health care, and the people of Nueva Vida had no access to doctors or medicine. Although we were still a few months away from setting up what would become the permanent Nueva Vida Clinic, nurse Linda Mashburn came down to Nicaragua that summer and led a nutritional census of the children to get a better idea of the scope of the malnutrition.
That was how I came to be in the tent with Francisco and his mother in a gut-wrenchingly intimate moment where I knew that a child’s life hung in the balance as he suffered from starvation in front of my eyes. That image, and that feeling, has haunted me for 26 years, and will be with me for the rest of my life.
2025: Nicaragua’s New Generation
What was Francisco’s fate? We don’t know. We brought immediate food aid to the family, but they soon moved on, and we lost track of Francisco as we lost track of so many others in that refugee camp.
Fortunately, I can tell you the fate of Nicaragua’s new generation. Earlier this year, our clinic participated in a nation-wide nutritional census, helping to weigh and measure children in Nueva Vida and the rural areas where we work. Our health promoters registered 185 children to receive micronutrients from the Ministry of Health every month to help with their growth and development.
Last week, as we handed out the first packets to our tiny patients, the results of the nutritional census came back:
46.6% reduction in acute malnutrition, from 5.8% in 2016 to 3.1% in 2025.
56.9% reduction in chronic malnutrition, from 13.7% in 2016 to 5.9% in 2025.
In 2025, Nicaragua has free universal health care, free education with a hot meal daily for 1.2 million school children, and a host of poverty reduction and income generation programs. This integral approach by the Sandinista government and its herculean efforts to ensure that these programs reach every corner of the country help guarantee that Nicaraguan children today won’t know the type of hunger that Francisco suffered in 1999.
1990-2006: Hunger in neoliberal Nicaragua
There is no stronger fear than hunger. Hunger has been used historically to control people: if your children are hungry, you will be willing to work for little and accept bad working conditions just to feed them. During the 16 years of Nicaragua’s neoliberal government rule, big business required a cheap, docile workforce in order to further enrich the wealthy. The government’s complete abandonment of the poor led to chronic malnutrition in children under 5 years old, which had reached 21.7% by 2006.
1970s: Hunger in Nicaragua under Somoza
Further back, under the cruel Somoza dictatorship, malnutrition rates were even higher. Keeping the Nicaraguan people hungry was essential to quell uprisings and ensure Somoza’s continued reign. In the 1970s, a group of poor peasants met to discuss and interpret the gospel, and these conversations were recorded in The Gospel in Solentiname. During a discussion of the Slaughter of the Innocents from the Book of Matthew 2:16-18, an astute young observer said, “[In Nicaragua] there is so much infant mortality, and so many stunted, undernourished children. I think that is persecuting children. I think the same thing is happening here as happened to Christ when he was persecuted as a kid.”
Today: Gaza’s slow starvation
The persecution of children through forced hunger continues today.
As I celebrate the victory of historically low malnutrition rates and feel joy for Nicaragua’s children, I simultaneously feel anguish for the children of Gaza: in the past 10 days, the daily death toll from forced starvation has increased alarmingly.
With Palestinians unable to leave Gaza, no farming due to constant attacks, and fishing banned by “Israel,” all food must be brought into Gaza from outside. These food shipments are controlled by “Israel,” and carefully calculated to allow people to slowly starve, designed to control the Palestinian people through hunger.
Right now, it feels as if the whole world is standing inside a black plastic tent, watching all of Gaza’s children desperately trying to latch on their mother’s breast. We are all in a a gut-wrenchingly intimate moment where we know that the lives of these children hang in the balance as they suffer from starvation in front of our eyes. This genocide will surely haunt the world forever. The question is, will we move to stop it?
BR/OT
