Two students gave a lecture on foreign child hunger last night as a preview to the Student Union Service Council’s Thirty-Hour Famine, an event designed so students can get a small taste of what it means to go hungry, event planners said.
The famine starts on Friday, Feb. 21, at 7 p.m., and will last until Saturday night, according to Student Union Service Council commissioner Mike Pereira. While going over a day without food, students will have a sleepover in Marsh Chapel Friday night and perform community service work on Saturday, he said.
‘At night we’ll meet again at Marsh Chapel and feast,’ Pereira said.
Pereira, who is attempting the famine for the first time this year, has no concerns about going 30 hours without food.
‘I’m pretty excited … it should be a fun event,’ he said.
Students ask for cash sponsorships before attending the event and the proceeds go to World Vision, a Christian organization that helps fight child hunger worldwide, according to Pereira.
An information session will be held tonight in the Academy Room in the GSU at 6:30, where people can learn more about the famine and pick up sponsorship packets.
The 30-hour famine is a nationwide event, and this is Boston University’s second year participating. The Service Council is the only organization in the area that contributes, according to Pereira.
‘It’s typically a small group of students who are committed,’ Pereira said. He is hoping for about 50 people to attend.
Amy Jarvinen, a senior in CAS who was the first speaker at last night’s lecture, spoke about her experiences in Nairobi, Kenya, where she worked last summer with World Vision.
Jarvinen said she spent half of each week during her trip in the program’s child sponsorship office recruiting children for the program and receiving mail from the children’s American sponsors. She spent the rest of her time in Kenyan communities visiting the sponsored children and holding community meetings, she said.
‘We helped them solve their problems, instead of us doing it for them,’ Jarvinen said. ‘I was struck by how all their problems were compounded on each other … how do you fix them? I don’t know the answers.’
Jarvinen said she was horrified to see children playing in the polluted sewers during an attempt to clean the Nairobi slums.
‘I just remember thinking, this can’t be real, and I had to say to myself, Amy, this is real,’ she said.
This is Jarvinen’s seventh year taking part in the famine.
‘I always tell people it’s not as hard as it sounds,’ she said.
The second speaker, Moira Hennessey, said she has never done the famine before, but is considering it this year.
Hennessey’s presentation was on her experiences working for the Mkombozi Center for Street Children in Tanzania.
‘The [United Nations] estimates that there are 150 million street children worldwide,’ Hennessey said. She described the lives of Tanzanian children living in poverty, saying many realize if they go home after work they have to share their money with their families, so they stop going home.
According to Hennessey, street children are often abused violently and sexually, drug users and subject to malnutrition and disease. The Tanzanian government reacts to the country’s problems with repression, she said, exemplified by the arrest of every child living on the streets during the height of the tourist season.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
