Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Hunger Crisis

I first saw a story about a program called “Feed the children” on television and was really interested in doing something to help. I found the website online with the intention to donate something and was shocked by what I found. When I started reading about the Feed The Children program I thought that it was a program for third world countries. I was amazed to see that millions of children here in the U.S. are starving. I am not that naive to think that everyone in the U.S. has everything they need to survive but it was a little disturbing to me to see that so many children so close to my own home are going to bed hungry. It is estimated by a number of different websites that more than 13 million of our youth are affected by this hunger crisis. It boggles me that we are considered to be among the wealthiest countries and yet we have such high numbers of children living in poverty.
Hunger and malnutrition are the number one risk to health worldwide, said to be 1 out of 7 people by the UN World food project. That is greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. America is not the worst case of hunger crisis by any means. Kenya, Nairobi, Darfur, Ethiopia, Korea, China, and many more have crises more severe than here in the U.S. Each of us could do something, be it big or small, to make an effort to help. Tell a friend, pass the word, make a donation, run a marathon, many of the websites have information about how to start a fund raiser and become the hero. Whatever it may be, something needs to be done. As many of us eat very well each day we can forget about all of those people that are lucky to eat in a week what we may have in a day. Working in a restaurant I could probably feed a village on what is thrown away in a single day. We can’t ignore what is going on around the world. Equally important, we need to be sure that more people know how serious it is locally. I don’t think that I would be the only one surprised.

1 comment:

  1. All of the commercials and internet ads talk about the children living with hunger in all of the third world countries. I have never seen one pertaining to those in the U.S. who are starving. It's almost as though we are suppose to turn a blind eye to what's going on here. We're the U.S. it is not an issue here. We are ine of the richest countries in the world. I think it is unfair to the children living here and need the assistance to have other Americans donate their money to other countries and not have full knowledge of what is going on here, right under their noses.

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