Are You Hungry?

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Imagine if you didn’t eat anything from noon today until dinnertime tomorrow — that’s a long time — 30 hours without food. According to World Vision, 30 hours is about the length of time many people in struggling countries have to last between meals. And even then, it’s not as if the meal those people have is particularly satisfying.

This past weekend, members of the youth group at my church held a 30-Hour Famine, fasting for 30 hours to get a sense of what it might feel like to not eat for that long.

If you’re a member of the church, or a youth who attended the event, and you didn’t see the slide show yet, please e-mail me and I’ll provide the link and password.

At the start of the event, each teen was assigned an identity within a tribe. Most people in the tribes had some sort of disability they had to deal with for most of the weekend. The few who had no disability had to pick up the slack for everybody else, carrying things for people, and taking care of those who had a hard time moving around.

For example, she was blind.

Blindness can be caused by a vitamin A deficiency, just one of the hunger-related problems the youth learned about.

Throughout the weekend, we were only allowed juice and water, but, as in many areas where starvation is a problem, the juice and water was not necessarily distributed fairly. (Even so, our young people had plenty to drink.)

To learn about the difficulties faced by communities that don’t have enough water, the water was turned off in the church building. Each tribe had to fetch their water from three long blocks away. And they had to be careful about how much water they used, conserving their precious commodity, and protecting it from other tribes.

The water they carried over in jugs was used for everything from brushing teeth and washing faces to flushing the toilets. That was challenging, and it was a good lesson for all of us to think about how much water we use every day.

The water outside was turned back on Saturday morning for a car wash. On empty stomachs, the youth worked from 9 until noon scrubbing cars and raising money for a Habitat for Humanity mission trip later this summer.

They even made their own t-shirts, decorating them using stencils and fabric paint. The one above says, “I starved so others wouldn’t.”

From home, each person brought ingredients to make stone soup. They worked in the kitchen in shifts all afternoon preparing the meal from scratch that they would eat later that night. It was torture to smell the food cooking. Sampling was not allowed.

To get a sense of the sheer number of people who die from hunger and hunger-related illnesses, the teens placed 1,200 crosses, each one representing one person who had died of hunger in the last hour, in the church pews. The kids had to keep going back to re-space the crosses in the pews, making them closer and closer together, because the boxes of crosses kept coming. Eventually, the walkways outside were also lined with crosses since they wouldn’t all fit inside.

By Saturday afternoon, energy levels were at a major low.

Once we blessed our food — and what a blessing it truly was — most of the food was gone in minutes! That was the best stone soup I’ve ever tasted!

People who came to church on Sunday morning had to move the crosses in order to sit down, and Pastor Curtis Lane Paul II, the organizer of the Famine event, used the experience to tell the congregation about the weekend.

The visual of each person holding up a cross representing someone who had died of hunger in the previous hour was very powerful.

If you meant to donate, but missed your opportunity to sponsor one of the teens, you can still send a donation to the church.

The best news is that all donations are being matched FOUR TIMES by the U.S. government, so if you were to send in a donation of $20, a total of $80 would go to help feed people in struggling nations. Make your check out to “World Vision” and mark “30-Hour Famine” in the memo field.

Please send your donation to
First Presbyterian Church
270 Woodbridge Ave.
Metuchen, NJ 08840

Special thanks to all the youth for making the commitment to work towards ending hunger. What a truly admirable thing to do. I am so proud of you all!