Saturday finally came. And I was looking at my watch very often.   

As the sun began to set, Henry had two visitors, Tom and Joe. They were two miners and were Henry's friends. They carried guitars and brought flowers and a bottle of whiskey. They put the flowers in vases and began to play some fast and lively songs.

That night, they kept giving Henry glasses of whiskey, which they made him drink. When I reached for one of the two glasses left on the table, Tom stopped my arm. "Drop that glass and take the other one!" he whispered. He gave the remaining glass of whiskey to Henry just as the clock began to strike midnight.

Henry emptied the glass. His face grew whiter and whiter. "Boys," he said, "I am feeling sick. I want to lie down."

Henry was asleep almost before the words were out of his mouth.

In a moment, his two friends had picked him up and carried him into the bedroom. They fastened the door and came back. They seemed to be getting ready to leave. So I said, "Please don't go gentlemen. She is coming back and will not know me. I am a stranger to her."

They looked at each other. "Henry's wife has been dead for nineteen years," Tom said.

"Dead?" I whispered.

"Dead or worse," he said.

"She went to see her parents about six months after she got married. On her way back, on a Saturday evening in June, when she was almost here, the Indians captured her. No one ever saw her again. Henry lost his mind. He thinks she is still alive. When June comes, he thinks she has gone on her trip to see her parents. Then he begins to wait for her to come back."

"On the Saturday night she is supposed to come home, we come here to be with him. We put a sleeping drug in his drink so he will sleep through the night. Then he is all right for another year."

Joe picked up his hat and his guitar. "We have done this every June for nineteen years," he said. He opened the door of the pretty little house and then they disappeared into the darkness.

Today, some 815 million people suffer chronically（长期地） from hunger. And although this is significantly fewer people than the numbers we saw a decade ago, hunger still kills more people than AIDS, Tuberculosis（肺结核） and Malaria（疟疾） combined.

On May 28th, we observe World Hunger Day. It is an effort to focus attention on the fact that despite an adequate availability of food nearly everywhere, globally, some 21,000 people die every day from hunger or malnutrition（营养不良）.

People do not go hungry because the world does not produce enough food for everyone. According to the world Hunger Education Service, over the past three decades, significant growth in food production, along with improved access to food, helped reduce the percentage of chronically undernourished（营养不良的） people in developing countries from 34 percent to 15 percent. The principal problem is that many people in the world still do not have resources to purchase or grow enough food.

Indeed, hunger is a consequence of poverty, and also one of its causes. Hunger exists because many countries lack social safety nets; because in many countries women, although they do most of the farming, do not have as much access as men to training, credit or land.

Conflict, governance systems that do not encourage investment in agriculture, poor management of land and natural resources, lack of educational opportunity, displacement of small farmers by natural disasters, and financial and economic difficulties that remove jobs at the lowest levels, all contribute toward creating conditions that push the poorest into hunger.

Over the past decade, a global push to reduce hunger and extreme poverty has marked some significant successes, thanks in part to the efforts of numerous international and transnational institutions, foundations, NGOs and governments, including the United States.

But on world Hunger Day, let us not forget that with over 815,000 people still living in daily food insecurity, we still have a long way to go before we can safely say that no child goes to bed hungry most nights and that no parent skimps on（节省） their own dinner so the children can eat.