When Will Nation's Most Powerful Show Regard for Nation's Most Vulnerable? {video: witness to hunger

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/27-9

In 1989, when Dr. Mariana Chilton was a junior in college, she lived in Chile for a year working as an interpreter for a US reporter doing a story on “Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared.” It was just after Augusto Pinochet had been voted out of office.

Chilton traveled the Atacama Desert with “wives and daughters and sisters” who were searching for hundreds of loved ones who had been murdered and buried in mass graves.

“They were trying to call attention—carefully—to finding their loved ones,” she told me. “People were starting to learn how to come out and talk—it took their enormous courage to break seventeen years of silence.”

Fifteen years later, as an associate professor at Drexel University School of Public Health and co-principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch, that indelible experience of breaking the silence would change her work on poverty and nutrition at the Center for Hunger-Free Communities (@HungerFreeCtr).

She was testifying before Congress on the 2007 Farm Bill, offering data on food stamp benefits and how critical they are for children’s health.

“I literally watched the Congresspeople’s eyes glaze over, and I thought, ‘Well this isn’t doing it,’” she said. “I thought of all the women that I’d spoken to who had invited me into their homes to talk about hunger in the previous two years, and that they are the ones who needed to be testifying. The people most directly affected by food policy were being left out of the conversation. How do you get their stories out? How do you break through the silence?”