I ATE NOTHING, AND DID SOMETHING! (my 12-Hour Famine experience)

Date: 11-06-10 ——- It’s never too late to blog. ☺

What: World Vision Philippines “12-Hour Famine”

Where: Flying V Arena, San Juan, Manila

               

“There are three kinds of people: The one who make things happen. One who watch things happen. And the one who ask, “What happened?” - Karen Davila

Ever since I first heard about the World Vision Foundation, I instantly became interested in it, because I found out that this foundation aims to give poor children, from all over the world, a brighter future by sponsoring them in school. And when I was told that World Vision Philippines will be holding its first 12-Hour Famine last November 2010, I swore to myself that I would never let the opportunity of being part of it pass.

The World Vision’s “Famine campaign” is a global youth movement against hunger and poverty. We know that poverty is synonymous to hunger, right? But some of us have no idea that hunger is one of the leading child killers in our world and that a child dies from hunger related causes every seven seconds. So in this campaign, a group of people or a single individual takes pledge to fast (abstain from solid food) for hours as a sign of their sacrifice and support to the campaign, and also to experience how it actually feels like to go without food. Then they help raise funds to help children go to school. According to my cousin, what they have in Canada is a 30-Hour Famine, and a 40-Hour Famine in Australia. As a start here in the Philippines, what we had was a “12-Hour Famine.”

The event didn’t turned out exactly how I expected it to be. I didn’t know that there were a bunch of celebrities coming until the program started, and to name a few; Karen Davila, Nikki Gil, Tippy dos Santos, Chris Tiu with the Smart Team Gilas, Paul Soriano, Ruffa Guttierez with her two daugthers, Sam Concepcion, DJ Jordan, Kristal Bello-Henares and Lea Salonga, who had me and my Ate really starstrucked when she came near us to fly paper planes with us. 

                

I also didn’t expect that we will all just be sitting there to watch the celebrities perform and to listen to their stories, because I thought it was all about participating in activities that they prepared. Please don’t get me wrong here; I’m not saying that the event was boring. In fact, even though I was just sitting there, hearing my stomach grumble, the whole time, still I was able to absorb many things from their talks, from their stories and most especially from the videos they had shown, which all nearly made me cry and made me wonder… how can we be so ignorant, from the reality?

Some of the stories from the videos that I couldn’t get out of my head, up to now; the little boy who walks for two hours (span of a one movie) and crosses five rivers just to get to school, the “Pagpag kids” who only eats leftovers from fast foods, and the families who try to survive with only or even less than 50-pesos a day.

I felt like the happiest and proudest girl when I survived the famine, especially when they announced that we were able to raise over two-million pesos only by participating in the event, which will surely go to the fund for the sponsor children across the country. A lot of realization came into me. I thought that if I already felt tad dizzy and weak by the 9th hour, what more are those people who get hungry for more than 24 hours are feeling? All the things that I just seem to take for granted; FOOD, ball pen, paper, comfortable bed, clean water and etc. all seem so new and important to me now. I realized that not everyone has the privilege on those things.

As a lesson learned from Karen Davila, I will be World Vision’s ambassador to my friends and to other people I know that are still naive to this matter, because if more and more people will stop being like the 3rd kind of person, we will be able to help more children to go to school and stop the growing number of people who gets hungry.

This is something I want to get involve to, as much as I can. You don’t need to be a celebrity to be able to help, right? ☺

Visit World Vision Philippines’ website: http://www.worldvision.org.ph/