A World in Pictures

It's no secret that there are people starving all over the world. It's just rather convenient to forget what isn't always right in front of us.

In 1980, photographer Mike Wells captured an image that illustrates the horror of starvation and suffering of people in Uganda. The Starving Boy and Missionary shows the skeletal hand of a starving child in the hand of a missionary.

When you look at the picture, it almost doesn't seem real. How could that hand really belong to a human child? The sad thing is that this sight, while it looks awful and impossible to Americans and citizens of other "first world" countries, is fairly commonplace in other corners of the earth. People are shocked to see images such as this; it's terrible to even imagine that such things can happen to children. Seeing the results of human suffering, especially that of children, elicits strong emotional reactions in people. Yet these emotional reactions still aren't enough to get people off their feet to send aid to starving nations. You look at the picture, say "wow that's sad," and go back to whatever you were doing. And that is the eternal attitude of the well-off: sympathetic inaction.