In May 2009 my son and I moved to Hyderabad, India, ostensibly to organize a conference. In the middle of that work, one weekend in September 2009 we decided to cook food and distribute it to a nearby slum. On Sunday morning we spent six hours cooking imli rice (rice with the pulp from the pods of the tamarind tree). Along with tamarind we added sesame seeds, peanuts, coconut and various spices. It is a tasty rice dish and the sourness of the tamarind acts as a preservative. We put two full cups of rice into plastic bags and put more than 100 of these bags into a plastic bucket. in the evening we went by auto rickshaw to a nearby slum.

We took the bucket out of the rickshaw and my son began to distribute the packets. Within one minute there were scores of outstretched hands reaching to get right in front of my son and the bucket. In the pushing and shoving two women were knocked to the ground. In another minute the women grabbed the bucket and helped themselves to the remaining rice packets, in some cases breaking the packet and sending rice flying in the air. Within five minutes it was all over. The bucket was empty. Not all of the women were fed. Some went without. This five minute event had a huge impact. It is one thing to see hungry people on television clamoring and fighting for food. It is another thing to be face to face with that hunger in the real life. It was unbearable.

The first reaction was, it's just not enough. Feeding 100 people once a month or twice a month is not enough. Within two weeks of that incident I created Hearts Healing Hunger. In january 2010 it was officially incorporated in the U.S. with global headquarters in Denver, Colorado. In june, 2010, Hearts Healing Hunger was officially registered in the town of Siliguri, North Bengal.

The original dream when creating Hearts Healing was to feed one thousand people every single day. That remains the dream. We started on May 27th, 2010. In the first week we tried to go out daily and feed 150 people. But, the work proved too exhausting. Hence from the beginning we have been cutting vegetables, cooking and going out three times weekly, sometimes two times weekly. We are limited both by lack of funds and by lack of manual labour to help in the food preparation.

Things move very slowly here in India. Still after two months we are waiting to get a land phone to use in local networking. Still we are waiting after two months to get a proper high speed internet connection to help with global networking and fundraising. Still we are waiting to get a proper gas connection, while in the meantime we are cooking on three small single burner stoves on the floor of our living room.

To start anything new is a struggle. This is the phase we are in right now. Hopefully more and more of you will help us so that we move past this initial phase and can start expanding to feed more and more people, so as to reach our target of one thousand people daily. Those one thousand hungry people are here. We do not see them on the streets of downtown Siliguri. They are hidden away behind the wholesale markets, in small huts and under pieces of plastic in fields and under flyovers, where hardly any rickshaw goes. But slowly, slowly, we are finding these people. Please, help us to feed more and more hungry people here in North Bengal.