Sitting on a hard floor, 16-year-old Shelby Clapper let out a gasp as organizers of a banquet at Archbishop Murphy High School announced that she and her friends would not be getting a three-course meal being served to others.
Their meal: rice and water.
“What?”
Julie Busch / The Herald
Clapper crouched over and held her head, aware of her rumbling stomach.
“I don’t think it’s fair,” the sophomore said. “But it does help you realize what’s going on in other countries.”
Gaining a more personal understanding of world hunger was the purpose of the Catholic school’s first “hunger banquet” on Wednesday.
“You can’t make a difference in the world unless you get in somebody else’s shoes,” said Daun Brown, a substitute teacher who helped some seniors come up with the idea.
The program, created by Oxfam, the international development and relief agency, divides diners into three groups, each representing a part of the world.
About 15 percent were seated at cloth-covered tables in the “high-income” area, with annual earnings of $9,800 or more a year, and served a three-course meal with sparkling red “champagne” cider.
About 25 percent of participants were seated at tables in the more modest “middle-income” section, with earnings of $680 to $9,799 a year. They got a meal of rice and beans.
The remaining 60 percent were seated on blankets on the floor, representing the world’s “low-income” tier, with earnings of less than $680 a year. They lined up for a small bowl of plain rice and a glass of water.
Alex Heye and Aaron Hitchcock, both 16, shifted in their seats in the high-income crowd. Several of their sophomore classmates were seated at their feet in the adjacent low-income section.
“Just drink it! Take it away!” cried Meagan Schireman, 16, looking longingly at Hitchcock’s glass of cider.
“It feels kind of bad, watching them,” said Heye, picking at his lasagna with a fork. “Normally when you’re eating, you don’t have them sitting right next to you.”
“It makes you realize how much you have in comparison to everyone else in the world,” Hitchcock said.
Cailin Short, 16, noted the images of starving children being flashed on a screen at the front of the room. Sitting on the floor – having gulped down her rice before Heye and Hitchcock had even finished their salads – gave her a new perspective, she said.
“I see that they’re hungry,” she said of the gaunt children on the screen, “but I don’t know what that feels like. When we’re hungry, we can just go to the pantry and grab some cereal.”
Ten students in teacher Margaret Ames’ theology class organized the banquet. The dinner capped a weeks-long fund-raising effort by the school for Catholic Relief Services’ work in Sudan.
Students and staff held ping-pong, basketball and dodgeball tournaments, as well as bake sales. The sophomores compiled a cookbook, “Junkfood for Jesus,” while freshmen sponsored an Easter egg hunt with prizes.
All told, the 400-student school raised more than $5,600.
Several African refugees attended the dinner, including Henri Amonles, an Edmonds Community College student from Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest countries.
“Many don’t know what they are going to eat for the day when they wake up,” he said.
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