Nourishment for the Hungry

Nourishment is vital to every individual, not just for survival, but one should be having all the nutrients and vitamins to stay healthy and to ward off illnesses, keeping the immune system functioning.

Unfortunately there are many who cannot even think about nutrition as such, having a battle to survive on whatever might be available to them. Eating well is just not a possibility, and sadly a situation like this takes its toll on physical and mental aspects of ones health, affecting people emotionally as well.

One need not feel helpless in this sort of situation, there is something each person can do to help reliever hunger, if only in one small way. Collectively it will make quite an impact. Tell your friends, tell everyone you know.

The heart and soul of The Hunger Site's mission

The heart and soul of The Hunger Site's mission, to help eradicate world hunger, is rooted in the struggle against poverty and hopelessness. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, is a part of that battleground. Eighty percent of the population lives under the poverty line, vulnerable to the country's all-too-frequent natural and socio-economic disasters.

In the past decade, the news from Haiti has been heart-wrenching. Entire communities and the crops they depend upon were repeatedly devastated by tremendous storms. Deforestation, exacerbated by charcoal production to cook or buy food, led to topsoil loss in a region where two-thirds of the population relies on sustenance farming. And word reached the world of people so desperate for food that they ate cookies of dirt mixed with a little fat and baked in the sun.

But Haiti is a place of hope as well as tragedy. In 1804, Haiti became the first black republic to declare independence. During the early days of the earthquake, that surviving spirit was visible to the world. Aid organizations could not immediately reach all of the Haitian population in desperate need of rescue, but that did not stop Haitians from helping each other. They fought to dig survivors out from the rubble with their bare hands. They treated wounds with what little they had. And amid unimaginable tragedy, survivors with nothing more than the clothes upon their back faced the dark nights together, lifting their voices in song.

At The Hunger Site, we are proud to support the Haitian people in their time of need.

Partners in Health has been working in Haiti for more than twenty years not only to provide direct aid for those in need, but also to train Haitians to become doctors, nurses, and medical staff. Now more than ever, every one of those Haitians is better equipped to save lives, and PIH is on the ground to help them accomplish that goal. Donations to The Hunger Site to aid earthquake survivors go directly and swiftly to Partners in Health for emergency supplies and aid

Hillside Allotment Garden

On December 13th, people were welcomed to the HILLSIDE ALLOTMENT GARDEN (Utanon alang sa Masanag nga Kaugmaon). This new garden was established through the joint efforts of the Community in Sitio Hillside, Barangay Lapasan, the City of Cagayan de Oro and Xavier University’s Periurban Vegetable Project (PUVeP). Financial support was offered by the Allotment Garden Association of Sint-Amandsberg (“Volkstuinen Slotenkouter”) and the Provincial Government of East-Flanders (Ghent, Belgium). Technical assistance was provided by the German Development Cooperation (CIM).

Who could ever deny that allotment gardens merit to be promoted as one of the best practices to combat desertification, hunger and poverty ? Any time wars on this planet have disturbed the global life (see World War I and II), allotment gardens have been created everywhere on pieces of barren land. They have saved thousands of lives of poor people by offering them a chance to produce their own bit of food and the necessary vitamins and mineral elements for their children. As a young boy, I have seen myself the success stories of a number of allotment gardens in Flanders during and after World War II, and I can assure you that, even nowadays, numerous people in my country Belgium are still enthusiastic about these splendid opportunities offered by our cities and villages.

Imagine what such allotment gardens could signify for people in the drylands or for the most unfortunate ones in the refugee camps all over this world. This is one of the reasons why I still don’t understand why international aid organizations, donors and NGOs do not concentrate their efforts on the creation of gardens, be it allotment gardens, family gardens or school gardens, to provide food security for millions of people.

Could someone tell me why such gardens can be created thanks to individual efforts of some small associations or organizations, like the Allotment Gardens Slotenkouter and the Provincial Government of East-Flanders in Belgium, and why such a “best practice” is not yet applied at the global scale, thanks to the financial support of important international donors ? Could this be discussed within the UNCCD ? Could this be studied as a possible theme for some famous Foundations ?

Or, shall we continue for ages to send masses of food to hungry people at regular intervals, or shouldn’t we change our strategy and start creating gardens everywhere ? With my Chinese friends I say : “Don’t give them food, teach them how to grow it !“, even in the desert.

For many years already I have been building an e-mail network for people interested in desertification, poverty and dryland gardening. Recently, I opened a part of this blog to “container gardening“. The main reason for the establishment of such a network is that I noticed, when speaking with my colleagues of the Committee for Science and Technology (CST) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), that we all spend a lot of time searching the internet for interesting publications concerning our fields of interest. Everyone is looking for the same information, spending considerable time to find mostly the same articles, all of us reading these texts to see if their content is important enough, and if it is, to use that info for our own purposes.

There is no general communication whatever between the members of the CST and between many more people interested in desertification, poverty, agriculture, horticulture and sustainable development. It does not suffice to send them the addresses of interesting websites, because not all the articles on that sites deal with dryland gardening, desertification, poverty, sustainable development or container gardening, so that we all have to start again searching and reading the content of the different sites. In other words: we all waste the same amount of time !

Therefore, I started selecting messages on these topics and all related subjects that can be important for people interested in the issues mentioned above and republishing the texts (some entirely, some partly) on my blog, so that my visitors do not have to switch again to all those websites to look for the entire texts they possibly want to read. My main aim is to reflect the diversity of publications on these topics. Thereby, I try to ease up the access to a panoply of articles and stories and to a panoply of sites and blogs. From time to time, I am also publishing my own contributions, mostly about my own experience with ways and means to improve plant growth in the drylands with a minimum of water and fertilizer.

Some people seem to be not so happy with this system, claiming their property rights. If so, I respect their views. I do not wish to harm their proper interests, whatever their objectives to create a public site or blog may be. I only tried to bring the attention of thousands of people worldwide to their messages.

Again, for me all this is a question of offering time-saving to my readers. This is not MY BLOG, it is OURS for I am only the administrator to easy up the work of many colleagues and friends. My blog visitors seem to be very happy with this system, as I offer them a chance to save plenty of time by aggregating valuable information on all aspects of the topics in a sort of newsletter, in which I (re)publish that what seems to be of some interest to most of us. This way, we all save time for more practical things to do and meanwhile we bring interesting websites and blogs to the attention of many more people worldwide than one single site or blog could do for itself.

Personally, I spend this time for collecting and aggregating the info because I am a retired professor of the Ghent University (Belgium) and I want to serve my colleagues and friends in an efficient way, without any other personal advantage than having the pleasure to serve and to do it the best way I can.

Of course, I mention always the source of the info I collect from the internet, so that the visitors of my blog can be immediately linked to my sources and go to these websites for additional interesting messages. Moreover, I am listing the links with important sites and blogs under my “Blogroll”, so that visitors of my blog can click directly the website’s address.

Observations, remarks, critics or additional ideas are always welcome. I also hope to find ways and means to improve cooperation and networking between people working for closely related websites. There is still a lot of improvement and collaboration to realize. Let’s do it together, in full respect for the work achieved by all of us, instead of “combating” each other in the battle of worldwide information!

The Hunger Project

Get Involved: Youth in Action!

Are you a young person that is interested in making a difference in the world?

Join The Hunger Project (THP) in its mission of ending hunger and poverty, while building your leadership skills. Here are some ways you can participate:

•Hold a bake sale/educational event at your school or in your community to benefit THP. Each item that is sold could have a label attached to it with some important statistics and facts about world hunger.

•Hold a fundraising event through your school, camp, youth group, religious group, or sorority or fraternity. Events could include yard sales, read-a-thons, benefit concerts and more!

◦The women of Alpha Chi Omega sorority in Quinnipiac University held a fashion show and donated the proceeds to THP. Staci Sherman (right), sophomore, said: "We thought that of all the other organizations out there, we loved the idea of ending world hunger and empowering women and their families to stay healthy every day."

◦Seventh and eight grade students at East Palo Alto Middle School in California had a special philanthropy project to research and choose ten non-profits focused on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to support. THP received one of the highest amounts of money: $1,700!

•End world hunger one grilled cheese at a time. FeelGood is an organization that was started in 2004 on the University of Texas campus as a grassroots effort to help provide solutions for an end to global hunger. Students distribute gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches in return for a donation, with all proceeds going to The Hunger Project. Participate in one of the FeelGood chapters on 27 campuses in the US and Mexico OR start a FeelGood chapter on your own campus. Visit their website.

•Help us reach out! Do a school and community drive to encourage people to sign up for THP's email list. Learn and share some basics about world hunger and THP and collect new members for our list.

•Run a Penny Harvest campaign. If your school partners with Penny Harvest, share about world hunger and THP with your friends and start/join a roundtable that will contribute to THP!

◦If your school is not yet a Penny Harvest partner, learn more about how to join! Since 1991, children between the ages of four and 14 have been converting their natural compassion for others into action by collecting pennies and turning those pennies into grants for community organizations.

◦In June 2009, two New York City schools participating in Penny Harvest collected more than $1,000 for THP! (Photo is Emma, Katrina and Casey from the Penny CAKES roundtable at P.S. 144 in Queens, NY with staff member Anastasia Andrzejewski)

•Dine at home instead of going out for dinner, ice cream or whatever with friends, and send money you would have spent to THP.

•Start a coin collection campaign for THP in stores in your neighborhood. Decorate a "coin can" and share about how important ending hunger is and that every penny counts.

•Write and put on a play. Help educate others about what hunger and poverty are like in the developing world by writing and putting on a play. A small admission fee could be charged with the proceeds going to THP.

For materials, more information, hunger facts and help in putting any of the above ideas into action, contact Anastasia Andrzejewski at aha@thp.org! If you have any more ideas, share them!