The campus is filled with worthy charity events almost every week. This weekend, there is a particular event that caught my attention. Like I said, there are lots of options if you are looking to volunteer your time but here’s an event that will give you a true experience.
It’s called the Hunger Banquet. Not to be confused with the popular book series, The Hunger Games, but it surprisingly, has similar themes. The Hunger Banquet is an event second year Melissa Almonte is putting on this coming Saturday, February 18.
So what is it all about? It seems a little bizarre, maybe even twisted to eat in order to raise awareness about world hunger but this much more than a dinner. When you enter McCormick Lounge, the venue for the Hunger Banquet, you will no longer be a UChicago student. The banquet places everyone into different income brackets and from there they will experience what a person from an impoverished country would if they went to a restaurant. This is how the inequality of the world will be shown. The differences between the income brackets is astonishing. Melissa’s hope is that people will have an experience that “makes people motivated to take action and be more aware of the global inequality of the three income tiers. There’s no reason for children to starve to death when there’s enough food out there to feed everybody well.”
The Hunger Banquet is sponsored by an on campus co-ed service fraternity called Alpha Phi Omega and is a trademark of OxFam America. I was curious what would inspire a person to take on the responsibility of such an event and Melissa answered that: “I think that the first time I truly became interested in this was when I visited the Dominican Republic and saw just how impoverished the kids living there were. Kids without shoes, or enough food in a day to even be considered a full meal. Their houses were falling apart, and they didn’t even have bathrooms. They had to walk miles to go to school, and for many, school was not an option because they had to help provide for their family. It’s one thing to hear about extreme poverty, and it’s another to truly see it.”
All of the proceeds from the event will go to the World Food Programme which has made fund for the Somalia drought relief. Going with the current them of hungry relief, Melissa wanted the proceeds to help people in extreme hunger. The people in Somalia who are experience the drought certainly qualify. As a society we need to be globally aware. Until I started talking with Melissa I was confused about world hunger. I thought more along the lines that there wasn’t enough food for those countries. In actuality there is enough food in the world for every person to have at least 2,720 kilocalories a day. By attending the Hunger Banquet we can step away from our first world mind set and truly feel what it is to be hungry because the emotion and feelings that you get from experience are far stronger than someone just telling you about the hungry people. Hopefully, this event will reach out to people and help them take action.
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So please attend this year’s Hunger Banquet! Tickets are four dollars and will be sold in Bartlett or you can email Melissa Almonte at malmonte@uchicago.edu
If you want to learn more about world hunger and what you can do to help go to OxFam’s website
Here’s the Details:
When: Staurday, February 18 from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm