A civil war broke out, their village has been burned to the ground, and the latter disappeared, kidnapped, so that her father has to find the strength to overcome disease, war, and famine to rescue her.
When I met her at the Harvard University Global Mental Health Program last year she told me about a surprising phenomenon: in spite of the fact that Cambodia had managed to overcome decades of conflict, famine and an AIDS epidemic, the number of orphanages around the country had doubled over the past decade.
There are stories like that of 14-year-old William Kamkwamba of Malawi, who overcame poverty and famine to build a wind turbine that powered his family home, using found materials and knowledge from the local library.
In its past, Ireland has overcome the British Empire, the Great Famine and decades of recessions far worse than this.
To get this far, Henderson and his team had overcome political resistance, ineffective vaccine stocks, floods, famine and civil war.
What we don't have is the ability to overcome outmoded and counterproductive evolutionary survival urges: hoarding against famine becomes greed, self-protection becomes aggression, alertness to danger becomes xenophobic fear, the reproductive imperative for survival becomes overpopulation.
Until his final two years, Mutharika had actually engineered an agriculture-led boom in Malawi, one that pointed a way for Africa to overcome its chronic hunger, food insecurity, and periodic extreme famines.
Three years later, after massive cuts in social welfare and government jobs, Dublin became the first Eurozone country to exit the bailout, having overcome the worst economic crisis in the country since the potato famine.
The programs hope to overcome the kind of hunger that is generally associated with poor diet and poverty rather than with famine.
