I wish I could be a human of Australia, or anywhere other than where I am. Unfortunately, I am a human of a small African nation. I do not even know what this place is called, where I live, because I have never been educated or seen a map. If I did see a map I would use it as a blanket – rather than use it to plan my next Contiki herpes exchange or frame it for my funky gentrified warehouse apartment. I guess I would call where I come from, something like, “Hell”.
My name is Magumbza Ahbleedin. I go to sleep every night praying to God to help me achieve my 5-year career goal of becoming sponsored by a child sponsored by a World Vision sponsor child. I once met an Australian family who were shooting animals on a poverty safari. I wish they had shot me to end my starvation nightmare.
The boy asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said “4 kilos and alive”. He said he wanted to become a celebrity like Justin Beiber. What is a celebrity? Can you eat one? I am so hungry. The boy asked me if I had seen the Hunger Games. He said his favourite part was Jennifer Lawrence’s jizz covered face from the leaked iCloud photo scandal. I asked him if he meant the Hunger Games that the UN soldiers played – where they would catapult sand filled cat food tins over the Aid Station fence, watch us on the CCTV with some beers and place bets on the winners of the ensuing gladiatorial death match.
The older sister told me that I was her “total ultimate thinspiration”. She asked me how I managed to get such a good thigh gap. I told her “severe malnourishment and the misdirection of Western aid into the hands of corrupt government officials and profit making charity organisations with layers of donation-absorbing middle-management bureaucracy”. She said that was “totes amaze” and she would hashtag that under a photo she was going to post of a no-make-up-holiday-selfie on facebook. I have heard of a facebook before. A Ugandan warlord had a book of the skinned faces of all the villagers he had killed during his raids through Rwanda. He had thousands of followers but not so many likes.
I told her that I hadn’t had anything to eat in over 4 weeks. She couldn’t believe it, she couldn’t believe that for over a month I had nothing to instagram. I once saw a photo of maize, and it made my body convulse uncontrollably from hunger and I could hear my stomach-acid boiling my spine. She showed me a restaurant at the safari reservation she was staying at that was rated 89% on Durbanspoon. She said, it meant 89% of people liked it. The other 11% of people must have been macheted to death before they got to eat something.
The girl told me about a Food Truck craze in Australia, where trucks selling food like tacos and burgers drive around and feed people at street festivals. We have a similar food truck craze here, where the local warlord landmines all of the roads leading into an aid camp and ambushes convoys of Red Cross trucks, then chases down any surviving missionary workers and cuts their heads off. And then drags their headless bodies through the streets, raping the local women and kidnapping babies to turn into child soldiers. I guess that’s kind of like a street festival, or My Kitchen Rules. Sometimes I find a landmine and jump on it to try and put a quick end to my slow death, but unfortunately I don’t weigh enough to make it explode.
The girl’s mother asked me “how do you manage to maintain your figure even though you’re pregnant?” I told her that I wasn’t pregnant. My insufficient protein intake had caused my abdominal wall to eat itself causing a distended stomach. She said she knew exactly how I felt. She recently discovered she was also a closet vegan with a gluten intolerance that also caused her to feel bloated. She said that even though we lived so far away from each other, we were just like organic peas in a pod, and then she gave me a big hug that broke both my collarbones. I told her I was hungry and wanted some food. She said it’s best to just have a coffee to suppress your appetite, but that coffee sometimes makes you sweat. I said I would like to sweat because it would mean there is some moisture left in my body.
She said that she didn’t like cooking because it took too much time and she hated having to clean up afterwards. I agree. Onions were a pet hate of mine because they made my eyes water. The last time I saw an onion it made me cry from thinking that if I had found the onion a day earlier maybe my mother might still be alive. Having to clean up her sand encrusted eye sockets was also a pain, especially because we don’t have a dishwasher in our hut.
The Dad told me that he tries not to eat too much for lunch, because at about 2.00pm he gets a “food coma”. I told him my baby brother once went into a food coma and never woke up. He said “Haha yeah tell me about it, sometimes I can barely keep my eyes open after a big lunch”. I said, “me too, because my eyelids are weighed down by flies.” He laughed and gave me a big hug that crushed my sternum. I told him that a child in Africa dies every 3 seconds. He was surprised at that. He said “I know black people have rhythm, but that is some amazing timing, you guys should try out for X-Factor”.
He said he couldn’t believe that Ebola was caused by savage, uneducated, African people eating bush meat and not properly burying the bodies of the deceased. I couldn’t believe that there was such a thing as meat in Africa and that people had enough energy to bury a body. I heard that people in Australia sometimes throw food in a pile to make ‘compost’ for a ‘garden’. Whatever a compost is, I want to be one. Come and have a look at my ‘garden’. Here it is. Brown, hot, dusty sand for thousands of kilometres.
I asked them to give me some money. They said that they didn’t like giving homeless people money directly because they would just spend it on drugs. They’re right, I would probably spend it on drugs to treat my dysentery or HIV. They said they would give $100 to their local church when they got home. They said $100 is a lot for them, it’s at least 4 albums on iTunes and a few pro version apps. They said giving the money to the church was a better way for them to launder their guilt. Once the money was given to the church it was no longer their responsibility to find out whether it got to me, a starving, doomed child in Africa whose only thoughts have been of hunger, or whether it went to an Archbishop so he could buy the silence of a rent boy prostitute he had been butt-fucking for the past few years.
To be honest though, all this food talk is making me feel a bit peckish. I had an early lunch, back in 2004, so I guess I could eat something.
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