Divine makes a face at spinach, like so many twelve-year-olds around the world. Six weeks ago, she didn’t even have the strength to take a sip of milk on her own. Today, she has the right to complain. That’s the right of those who are no longer dying.

In May, for her twelfth birthday, she received a gift of starvation. Today, she eats beans and hesitates over whether to finish her fish. Between those two sentences lies an entire universe of human hope—ours, Sister Agnieszka’s, yours. Her mother’s hope. And only recently, Divine’s own, because only a nourished body can wake up each morning with enthusiasm.

The photos still show the marks of battle. Her eyebrows and eyelashes remain reddish—her body still telling the story of deprivation. But it is no longer dying. Her weight is stable. Her cells have stopped counting every calorie like a treasure.

At the nutrition center in Ntamugenga, we witness the same miracle of recovery every day. A cup of therapeutic milk F-100, an egg, peanut porridge eaten spoon by spoon. It’s the simplest math in the world—adding life to life. And yet, every therapeutic meal is an equation with one unknown: will the child survive until tomorrow?

Divine did. Not alone. Every one of you who, over the past weeks, gifted her a meal, took part in this miracle. Without you, her story would have had a different ending.

Hunger kills more surely than a bullet. The doctors in our nutrition center only reverse the process—meal by meal, day by day.

Divine is alive, and she’s picky about food. In our center, there are more children waiting for their chance to protest against spinach. Each plate of that chance costs about €4. One therapeutic meal. The difference between a story that ends and a story that is just beginning. Gift a meal to the children who need their chance.