Learning How the Other Half Really Lives

Sacred Heart Academy students took part recently in a banquet that left them hungry but wiser to how many are forced to eat everyday.

A Hunger Banquet provides an opportunity to educate people on hunger issues by directly engaging participants in a dramatization of the unequal distribution of resources and wealth in the world.

These young women pictured were in the Third World group -- 55 percent of the world fits in this group -- and waited in line for small portions of rice and water.

Students from the middle-income group (30 percent) were given a simple meal of soup and juice, and those in the high-income group (15 percent) were served a sumptuous gourmet meal.

"This experience brought to life the inequities in our world," said Donna Scaramella, moderator of the SHA Pro-Life Club, which sponsored the Hunger Banquet, "and challenged us, as the more economically fortunate, to realize how our decisions affect others in the world.

"Few left the Hunger Banquet with a full stomach, but all left filled with a greater understanding of the problems of global hunger and poverty," Scaramella said, "and more importantly, the motivation to do something about it."