Letter About a 911 Call

Boy, 4, Pulls Fire Alarm to Get Food

After a 4-year-old boy pulled a fire alarm outside his family's Lorton apartment Saturday night, Fairfax County firefighters arrived to find not a fire, but the boy and his twin baby brothers left unattended without food.... Police said the youngster triggered the alarm around 10:20 p.m. He was home alone with the 15 month twins and he told firefighters "none of the children had eaten," said Officer Jayne Woolf, a police spokeswoman. "There appeared to be no food in the house" ... The boys were taken into protective custody by county social workers. About 2:30 a.m. the boys' mother, Kandis Kinney, returned to the apartment ... and was charged with felony child abuse.

Charles Dickens was not this creative in dramatizing social conditions.

Share Our Strength's philosophy is that it takes more than food to fight hunger. It never occurred to me that it may also take firemen. Imagine pulling to the side of the road the next time a shiny, red hook-and-ladder roars by, sirens screaming, only to wonder if there is a fire across town or a starving child.

It's one thing to need rescued. It's another thing to have to sound the alarm yourself at the age of four. Elian Gonzales had millions of people concerned about his safe passage to the nation's capital. This four-year-old living in the nation's capital had no one but 911. What will the rest of their lives be like for these three young boys? What becomes of a 15-month-old who lays hungry and alone in the dark when the one person he should be able to count on to love and protect him is more felon than mother?

Child advocate Jonathan Kozol has just written a new book called Ordinary Resurrections: Children In The Years of Hope. It is about the resilient children in the South Bronx whose spirits still soar despite lives mired in poverty. "They haven't yet been soiled by the knowledge that their country doesn't like them very much." Kozol says. "They don't know that yet."

Some of the communities we most want to help are the hardest to help because the dysfunction that plagues them is literally beyond anything we can imagine It does take more than food to fight hunger. Amidst all that is rewarding and fulfilling about our work, there will always be this heartbreak that hovers over it: what kids need most is the one thing we can't give, grant, or buy them: a parent's love. No foundation can approve a request for it, no volunteer can deliver it. Even the best interventions will always be sub-optimal to not having to intervene in the first place. There is a difference between making a child well and making a child whole.

From Ethiopia to Anacostia, we can't feed every hungry child. From Montgomery County where 64% of Zach's schoolmates failed the state's math test to Fairfax County where 4-year-olds who pull fire alarms for food live just a few miles from Internet billionaires whose weekly losses alone could feed the entire state, we can't mentor, tutor, or even provide for all of those in need. But we can at least sound the alarm. We should be able to do that much for them.

Social commentator and humorist Will Rogers used to joke that he didn't have to write material or make things up, he just read the papers. He could read 'em and laugh. We get to read 'em and weep.