…. can be pretty amazing. I work with students at Thomas Dale High School in Chester, helping them organize an annual benefit concert called the Rock 4 Life concert. The students help choose the cause, organize the concert, create arrangements for string orchestra and a band (ours), create artwork, advertise and publicize the concert, you name it…. they take care of it. Last week they had to do a writing assignment for one of their other classes and I had them write a blog entry about world hunger and Rock 4 Life.
Here are some of the things they wrote:
“Have you ever actually thought of a world where hunger is no longer an issue?” – T.J. Kipp
“Why would we want to put anyone through the pain and debilitating worry about when, or even if, their next meal will be? Help them. Help us. Help the world.” – Lizzy Shearer
“Imagine this. A young child, no older than the age of 9, sitting on the side of the road looking for food so that he may survive. His body thin and frail, like even the smallest amount of pressure would break him. Not far away from the child, a buzzard sits and waits for his next possible meal as if predicting that the boy isn’t going to make it. There’s a high chance that the bird got its meal, because that child was malnourished and could not go on any longer…… Count to yourself about 3.6 seconds… Someone in the world just died from starvation.” – Alex Henshaw
“A common misconception about hunger is that the problem is too big to handle. At first, that’s what I thought, too. I was intimidated by the statistics like how well over 800,000,000 people are undernourished and more than 25,000 die of hunger daily. In truth, these numbers should be overwhelming because there is something completely off about this whole situation. How is it that so many lives are lost because of malnourishment across the globe while there are over a BILLION overweight people in the world, about 400,000 of them obese? Why is it that over $100,000,000 of food purchased by households in America is thrown away?” – Helen Jones
“You want to know what makes me mad? And I mean gut-feeling, make-you-wanna-cry, fire-in-your-belly angry. It’s the fact that there is enough food in the whole world to feed everyone, but over 25,000 people die of hunger every day. And in the poorest nations that have the hungriest people, 90% of crops are exported to wealthier nations like ours.” – Rebecca Disney
“More of us need to learn to listen. Listen to the cries for help. More importantly, listen to what you can do about it…. Can you afford to help? Before you answer that, listen to your heart. Can you afford not to?” – Jonathan Warren
I will post some of their entries in their entirety in the coming weeks. For now, I love the passion I see in these high school students – it gives me hope for our collective future.
