We’re building a better life for children. We’re going to change the world. We’re fighting hunger. We are going to famine.
Our stomachs are growling, our heads are pounding and we’re hungry. What’s happening to us?
We aren’t eating for 30 hours. That has to be impossible, right? Yet through all the pain of not eating, high school students from Zion Lutheran Church and around the world participated in World Vision’s 30 Hour Famine Feb. 21 and 22, to raise money for children who are starving.
Not eating for 30 hours really isn’t as bad as it seems. Trust me, I would know. I’ve done the famine for the past three years. People say things like, “You’re crazy” and “I could never do that”. Whether you’re 10 years old, 20 or even 60, you can do the famine.
If you’re in the right mind set, anyone can do it. Just drill it into your mind that you are not going to eat. You won’t be thinking about it and won’t be as hungry.
It hits you around 3 p.m. that you haven’t been eating since 8 a.m. You can feel the emptiness in your stomach; your head might even start to hurt a little. Somehow, around dinner time, the hunger starts to fade away. By the time you are going to bed, it feels like you don’t need to eat at all.
We’re all in this together. Nothing is going to change in these children’s lives unless people, just like you and me, help them. All thanks to donations and events like the 30 Hour Famine, deaths from starvation have been decreasing, but there is still more work to be done.
According to the World Vision website, in the 1960s there were more than 50,000 deaths annually due to things like hunger, poverty and disease, that could have been prevented. More recently, in 2011 there were fewer than 9,000 deaths. If people continue to help and care about those who are dying, we can get that number decrease even further.
Students from all around the globe participate in this famine. We don’t eat so that children who are starved have a chance to. The money and awareness we raise for these children has a much greater impact then the impact of not eating for 30 hours.
The pain passed. The hunger wasn’t not in our minds. And finally, after we raised awareness and money for the children who need it, we ate.
