Mean Bean Challenge Day 1

The Tearfund Mean Bean Challenge is 5 days of eating what many people in the throws of food poverty eat daily - rice and beans, to stand in solidarity with the hungry and say 'You are not forgotten', as well as to raise money for Tearfunds efforts to relieve food poverty.

For the first twelve hours one is just astonished [...] nothing to eat... Nothing!... But that's farcical. There must be something one can do. - Jean Rhys, Hunger

My bowl of oatmeal is usually a little different. Chopped apple, almond butter and cinnamon or chocolate and banana... I usually mix things up over the stove. Today however, I woke up and, after prolonging breakfast as late as my rumbling tummy would allow, boiled the kettle, poured it over my oats, and had it plain like that. (As part of the challenge plain porridge is also allowed.)

The porridge stuck to my spoon and my mouth, but I was hungry and so it tasted warm and filling.

For a while.

In about an hour I was hungry. But I busied myself with preparing for my presentation later that day, pumping my bicycle tire, and cycling to lectures earlier than usual.

I yawned more than usual in lectures, but didn't miss anything. Mondays being my longest days, I'd brought along my lunch (black beans and rice) in an ice-cream box. I thought about last night. I'd been trying to figure out what to write as I asked people for Tearfund donations, and decided to look up the statistics for Hunger in the world.

It shattered my heart.

1 in 9 people go to bed hungry, and wake up the next day without enough food for a healthy active life. What really pierced me, however, was the terrible statistic that hunger accounts for 45% of deaths in children under the age of 5 years. I can't imagine being a mother and being unable to fulfil that basic desire to give your child a life. To watch your child literally shrivel away in front of you, and die because it was hungry. That is just completely evil. No mother should have to see something like that, no child should have to die that way.

Reading those statistics gave me such heavy boots. God, why does this happen?

Father, be with all those who are hungry. Be with those whose hunger distracts them, physically pulls them away from you. Oh God, there is so much evil in hunger, because it is a handicap to worship. Please be with all the mothers who lose their children. Please give extra love and strength to the hungry and hurting. You are a good good God, a compassionate God, and your heart breaks to see this, all the time, every day. You never forget or lose sight of the hungry Lord and you promise them an end to suffering in Your Kingdom. Please keep that hope alive in them.

A little silver lining on the gloom of reality is that with this challenge, washing up has become a complete breeze.

Over dinner, I found myself consciously slowing down my chewing, stretching out my meal to last at least 20 minutes, which is apparently how long your brain takes to send signals of satiation to the rest of your body.

As I write this, I'm hungry. Not painfully hungry, but awarefully hungry. And in my awareness, I know I am hungry and not starving, and for that I'm thankful.

Once, when he had been a Four, he had said, just prior to the midday meal at school, “I’m starving.” Immediately he had been taken aside for a brief private lesson in language precision. He was not starving, it was pointed out. He was hungry. No one in the community was starving, had ever been starving, would ever be starving. - Lois Lowry, The Giver