Thirty Hour Famine

The 30 Hour Famine icon, from their website.

Last weekend,  we had the Thirty Hour Famine at the Cathedral.  That is a youth event, where the youth learn about world hunger while fasting for thirty hours.  The fast is a fast from foods, but we could drink some broth and fruit juice.  It also involved doing some service projects.  We started fasting at 1 in the afternoon on Friday.  The kids arrived at the Cathedral around 7 in the evening.  We did some games and activities, learning about hunger, interspersed with games to goof off and relax.  The next morning, we did some more games and worked on two service projects for the Cathedral, cleaning up the Sunday School supply room and working on a banner.

We also watched The Rescue of Joseph Kony’s Child Soldiers, which is a movie about child soldiers in Uganda.  After watching the movie, some of the group went down to a rally in support of the child soldiers, held at Lewis and Clark High School.  We all went to the 5:30 service Saturday evening, and then we had dinner around 7, breaking our fast.  After dinner, we all packed up and went home.

The event was pretty good for raising awareness of world hunger.  There were a lot of stories and pictures of people suffering from hunger throughout the world, which do make the issue of world hunger more real and vivid.  That is a good way to present information to people, so they can understand it and connect to it.

However, some of the information was not presented as well.  There were a lot of numbers about world hunger, without a lot of context.  For instance, they had the statistic, 862 million people are chronically hungry, which on it’s own is just a number.  It’s so big, it’s hard to have a real gut feeling for it.  It’s a lot of hungry people, but how many, really?  It would be better to put this number in perspective by, for instance, saying the population of the Earth is about 6.8 billion people, so that means about one in eight people is chronically hungry.  One in eight is the sort of number that a person can imagine.

I am not sure whether the use of fasting to make the issue of world hunger more real was helpful.  Fasting, even if you do get broth and fruit juice, is hard because it makes you tired and cranky, which does make it harder to focus and learn.  Which is good for teaching you that it is hard to learn when you’re hungry, but bad for teaching you facts about world hunger.  Also, some youth chose not to come to the event because they did not want to have to go hungry.  To that extent, the famine was counterproductive.

At the same time, it does make you really feel what being hungry is like, which hopefully makes you care more about people that are hungry.  To that extent, it is useful.
On the whole, the event deals with an important issue, and some of the way the information is presented is good, but some of it could be presented better.