Students I spoke to at Mount St. Joseph University in Ohio created a FreeRice team to fight world hunger, something every school in New Hampshire could do, too.
FreeRice (freerice.com) is the online trivia game where every question you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated to the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), the lead global hunger relief organization. Playing FreeRice you can answer questions in vocabulary, literature, science, math and even foreign languages. The donations are paid for by advertisers on the site.
The WFP uses the FreeRice donations to feed hungry people impacted by war, drought and poverty. World Food Program spokesperson Steve Taravella says the WFP plans “to apply the 2019 Freerice funds to our most severe emergencies, which are: Central Sahel, DRC, Mozambique, Northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen.”
Previous FreeRice donations have provided school meals in Burundi and South Sudan.
So students can play this learning game and help raise donations to feed hungry people in war-torn Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. That is more power than students may have realized.
We all saw the images of the recent invasion of Northeast Syria by Turkey. The World Food Program says Syrian communities already suffering in hunger are hosting displaced persons after the attack. Syria has gone through nearly a decade of civil war and hunger.
Likewise in Yemen a civil war has caused a hunger emergency affecting over 20 million people. The impact of climate change has caused a severe drought in the Horn of Africa leading to more hunger. The Sahel region of Africa has seen conflict and drought causing hunger and deadly malnutrition.
With such a global hunger emergency ongoing, it’s vital every school and church have a program to help with relief. FreeRice is one of the ways schools can help. Imagine if every school in New Hampshire had its own FreeRice team to fight world hunger. You could have FreeRice tournaments like you do with football or basketball.
Such activism goes beyond the donations themselves. Taking action against hunger can also make a powerful statement for leaders in Washington to do more to fight hunger around the world. Global food aid programs receive far less funding than military expenditures, like the excessive spending on nuclear weapons.
FreeRice can be a powerful symbol of action similar to how the Friendship Train was after World War II when it collected donations for Europe’s hungry.
You cannot have peace in this world if people are suffering in hunger. As Dwight Eisenhower said when urging food aid after World War II, “no element is as important in preserving the peace of the world as food.”
Students today can take the most powerful action for world peace: feeding the hungry.
(William Lambers is an author who partnered with the U.N. World Food Program on the book “Ending World Hunger.”)