Blog 9: Hunger Dialogue Session

            As part of the curriculum for Honors Service-Learning, students must attend a dialogue session. The topics of these sessions range from hunger awareness to quantitative data to show the effects of our actions on worldwide hunger.

For my dialogue session, I attended the Hunger Awareness session, which took place in the Campus Center coffeehouse. In the coffeehouse, approximately 40 students gathered in a circle in order to maximize the number of participants. This was certainly an effective way to organize the group; if we had to sit in rows like we do in class, it would be much harder to get everyone to participate. Under the direction of the session leader, each student was able to voice their thoughts in contribution to the topic.

Everyone received a double-sided paper; on one side was a map of the world, and on the other side there were several statistics. On the side with the world map, certain colors coded for a certain amount of hunger in that area. Looking at the map, I was astonished to see how many nations are suffering from severe hunger.

The region with the most hunger seemed to be Africa. This session got me to think about what I can do to help. I remembered that in the fifth grade, I used to go on “freerice.com,” website that allows students to donate rice to those in need by answering vocabulary questions correctly. Each time you get the answer right, ten grains of rice are donated, and therefore, each time you get the answer right, it’s a piece of cake to donate lots of rice in a very little amount of time.

What can we do to change the statistics? Throughout the dialogue session, several students were given the opportunity to voice their opinions on the matter. For example, many students suggested volunteering at soup kitchens to help those in need.