Yesterday concluded my fourth 30 Hour Famine. It was a good time.
We had pretty low enrolment this year, as we weren’t able to spend the night at school, and being one of the people organizing this event, this was really frustrating. But, we made the most of it.
Danny from WorldVision came out and spoke to our Famine group, all ten of us, and it was really inspiring and fantastic. I’ve met up with Danny three times this year, and about three years ago in a totally unrelated setting, and the dude is awesome. God is definitely doing huge things through him, which is really, really awesome.
We had a lot of chill time–we did some icebreakers at the beginning, before Danny came, then afterwards had a lot of free time. We wrapped up starting at 9:30, and Sam and I spoke to the group about more WorldVision stuff like the youth retreat I went on in September and the Youth Empowered conference that we both were at in I think January. Then we ate at 10, cleaned up, and headed for home after 30 hours of hunger.
We all felt pretty sick due to the hypoglycemia induced headaches and the nausea that followed. I can’t imagine what those who have to go days, weeks, months without food or clean water to drink feel like on a day-to-day basis. Do their bodies just get used to it? And the sad thing is, this is totally preventable.
In 30 hours, the 15 of us who did the famine raised over $300 for WorldVision. That can feed ten families for a month–like, ten families of 5-8 people. Isn’t that insane? $30 Canadian dollars can feed 5-8 people for an entire month, as well as give them clean water, health care and education.
We’re a small percentage of our population. There are probably over 700 students at my school–and if 17 of us did the 30 Hour Famine, that’s about 2% of the school population that stood up and said “Yes! We are going to do something!”. At the beginning, we had 40 people stand up. 23 backed out before we got to the Famine. Still, that’s less than 6% of the school.
I want to say thank you to everybody, anywhere, who stands up. Anybody who refuses to do nothing, and gives a part of themself to a cause, to help the underdogs of the world. If our countries were wreaked with starvation and death from preventable things like dehydration, we’d want to be saved from this, too. Saved, though, in a way that preserves our culture.
I definitely feel blessed to be part of this movement. And it’s been a crazy journey that got me here. I bet that most people wouldn’t really even imagine parts of my past when they meet the person I am now–stuff like pretty intense depression while the will to live was being sucked out of me. But, I’m not writing about that now, because it’s not fully relevant–God saved me from death and gave me time to realize that all in Philippians 1:21 is true–to live is Christ and to die is gain.
In the last four years, I’ve given my life to Jesus, met a ton of amazing people, joined Global Issues at school, become a Global Issues Leader and through the group raised a ton of money for a huge variety of charities. It’s been really cool getting to know a bunch of awesome people, and serve the community, and the world, at the same time.
And it’s totally rocked my world. Like, this is what I’m here for. This is why God saved my life.
