we thought we were starving...

ok, so i just got back from my 30 Hour Famine.. a thing from World Vision for youth groups where we fast for (guess how many) 30 hours earning money and seeing how it feels to be without food for that long. we don't eat so other people can and this whole time we're doing service projects [that (erg..) usually involve food]. and i mean its really fun and stuff, and yeah. but this year a lot of things have REALLY hit me. and it ain't that hott.

ok, so we were split into tribe teams and me and this one dude were a team and we had to go shopping at markets with only 15 dollars and buy food with the best variety, amount, and nutritional value. so as we were going we would go by all this stuff like cake mix and i would be like, "oooooooh..!", but then i would remember that we really needed the protein from the beans and stuff, and since we were on a budget, that was our top priority. and in the end we had like 1 bag of food that coulda really fed us for a couple of days, and it just whacked me really REALLY hard how excessively i live and all the food i take in is just so overindulgent.. and its like i just make eating a habit like i don't have to think about it, worry about it at all, its just there, and i eat it. like every time i walk by the pantry i'll grab a box of cheez-its and my eating is almost constant. and now it just makes me so sick cuz like.. in so many other places in the world eating is not constant at all, its not regular and its not always available, quite the contrary actually. it could be day, week or MONTH long intervals between meals, and here i sit scarfing like theres no tomorrow, and i know that i will have food tomorrow, and the next day, i will be provided for, and in the rest of the world, for some of these people, there ACTUALLY will be no tomorrow. not like this. not at the rate their eating. and its very unlikely that these children in these poverty and disease stricken families will be provided for, all this work is not enough.

i felt really good about doing this whole famine thing, i can stop eating for a while, let the children eat. but its like, at the end we just all sit there, cramming food, just stuffing our faces, and its only been 1 day and a 1/4!!! i mean, seriously, i was watching my friends and i couldn't eat my half plate of food, i was so disgusted. we all would whine during the famine, "ohhhh, i'm STARVING!!!" but we are so not. not comparitively. its like we will NEVER really know that suffering. not at all. we all knew that we were going to be fed, we would get our food, we would be provided for, there was no real pain or worry. we will never have to feel that suffering, not me. i feel so blessed, but this is way too much. everyone should be blessed with the necessities of life, it shouldn't be a blessing, it should be a given, right? and i mean if we all just shared..

while we were fasting, this woman who had done a mission trip to hawaii came to talk to us. and she said that back in hawaiis history there was no owned land. no one had property, it was the earths and they lived on it, worked on it, and allowed it to grow. no one owned it because it was no one's to own, it was there and it was shared, from the mountains to the beaches.

isn't that a beautiful thing? thats how the earth was, thats how it should be. there is enough resources for everyone. EVERYONE. but the world we are living in now has more than 20,000 people dying EVERY DAY of extreme poverty. where here we are filling our stomachs to the limits. we eat our portion AND theirs!!! does that make ANY sense to you, at ALL?! no. i mean, if we all just shared a bit, did what we learned in preschool ["sharing is caring..." (PRESCHOOL PEOPLE!!!)] we could just feed so many, save so many lives, we could end poverty.