Kids Nourished by Effort to Help the Hungry

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED JUNE 1, 2007

The United Nations World Food Programme spends nearly $3 billion each year to combat hunger around the world. Most of that money comes from governments and big corporations. But WFP representative Bettina Luescher thinks little people can join the fight, too.

“Kids are so generous,” she said. “They really get it.”

Last month it was 4th and 5th graders at P.S. 234 and P.S. 150 who got it, as Luescher went to their schools to talk about her agency’s work, bringing emergency food relief to some 90 million hungry people in 78 countries.

“What do you think it would cost to feed a child somewhere in Africa for one day?” Luescher asked an audience of about 100 fidgety 4th and 5th graders in the P.S. 234 auditorium.

“Twenty bucks?” called out one boy.

“Maybe five?” guessed another.

“Are you ready?” asked Luescher. “It’s a big number…19 cents.” Around the room, mouths gaped and eyes bugged.

Luescher told of kids in other countries who can’t go to school because they help support their families. She explained the effects of malnutrition and described a free computer game called “Food Force,” in which players drop food, maneuver truck convoys and distribute aid.

But, at both schools, it was the numbers that most captured the kids’ attention. “Let me show you something,” Luescher said to a gathering of 4th and 5th graders at P.S. 150. She snapped her fingers, counted to five, and snapped again.

“Every five seconds,” she said, “a child somewhere in the world dies of hunger.” For some time afterward, the kids continued counting to themselves and snapping, staring at their fingers.

It wouldn’t be long before they got a chance to do something about the chilling statistics. For the second year in a row, volunteers from both schools—some 40 kids—worked the Taste of Tribeca food festival, asking for donations.

It was a drizzly, grey day for the festival, but the children, with their little plastic bags filled with dollar bills, didn’t seem to mind.  “They’re soaking wet,” said Taste of Tribeca volunteer Marinka Modderman, who helped coordinate the kids at the Citigroup-sponsored table. “But they’re so enthusiastic it’s not dampening their spirits at all.”

The grand total at the end of the day, including a few hundred dollars collected during an earlier effort at the Tribeca Family Festival, was more than $2,300. According to World Food Programme figures, that’s enough money to provide a year’s worth of school lunches for nearly 70 impoverished children. But the local kids, inspired by what they had learned about world hunger, took something away from the experience, as well.

“It just makes you feel good about yourself,” said P.S. 234 5th grader Alex Scheman, “and it makes you feel how we can have so much and other people can have so little.”

“I just thought that people who were hungry had enough food and they just lived,” said Theo Munger, also a 5th grader at P.S. 234. “But people die of hunger. I didn’t realize before that it was such a big problem.”

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