Up with People Cast A 2010 On Tour

Written by Coy Theobolt, USA, on Up With People’s Hunger and Poverty Banquet

The Hunger and Poverty banquet is an event that has been held around the world for many years to promote awareness about world poverty and hunger. Oxfam, a nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to end poverty and injustice around the world, has been sponsoring events like these that usually take place in homes, churches, and educational settings. The motivation behind the banquet is to divide participants into the three main socio-economic classes: the rich, the middle, and the poor. They are then given the typical meals of those groups in society. For example, those in the rich group are given three course meals and those in the poor group must share one pot of soup. This is meant to cause discussion amongst the groups about their feelings and thoughts on world hunger.

In Up With People we dealt with this topic just a little differently, as we always tend to do. Our evening started out with a wonderful presentation by a few members in our cast who are passionate about educating others about world poverty and hunger. Facts and figures flashed through a PowerPoint presentation, and we were taken aback as a group by a documentary based on the poor of the Philippines. I started to feel my heart shift a little as I thought about the time that I had spent remote villages and big city slums in India. My mind took me back to the day I spent in a slum house built on a trash heap. The house was smaller than my kitchen table at home and it drew in some uncomfortable conclusions about my own view of life. “How could the place where I eat food – the table which has never been empty and from which I have never left hungry – be bigger than this house in which lives six people? My mind slid back into my skull, as I was once again present.

Cast B was then led into a different building into which we walked in silence, viewing pictures from all over the world plastered to the otherwise barren walls. The blank space of the walls was synonymous with the idea. I watched the darkness of emotions flood the room lingering like a low-lying mist. Each step I took toward the next explicit image seemed heavier and heavier. The music in the background was drowned out by my constant inner monologue that was pressing further and further in my heart. My eyes glanced up from the floor and fell upon an image of a young girl so near the brink of starvation that her skin looked like a tanned piece of leather stretched over a drum. Each bone in her body was more visible and more real than anything I have ever seen. She was a corpse who had given up on life itself. At the time at which this photo was taken, hunger, and not life itself, was her only motivation. She was crawling toward a United Nations food bank located a kilometer away. She was being watched with a luring eye, as a vulture was crouched in the background, waiting for her to give up on life so it could feed. How can anyone survive in this war-torn Somalia hell? The caption of this picture described what happened after the picture had been taken. The photographer claims that he chased the vulture away, and that the girl continued on her trek and made it to her destination. However the photographer himself committed suicide three months later, due to depression brought on by this experience.

That image was enough for me, gripping onto my heart and not letting go. It held on with the tightness of an emotional rigor mortis. I had to sit down. My thoughts went wild and raced in no particular order:

All those people, all that hunger, all that pain, dying, disease, famine, my friends, my stomach, my dinner table, my mothers pot roast, my fathers grilled steaks, my comfortable bed, arid desert, the rocky mountains, my Indian family, the girl who did my laundry, the family that slept in the street, that woman whom I had seen lying in the gutter while dogs urinated on her.

And then silence.

Then Cast B partook in the actual activity of splitting into the three socio-economic groups and sitting down to eat. My mind had gone completely blank. A wash of white enveloped me and I felt like I had just gone through an emotional reboot. Everything started to slowly come back in focus, my vision returned and I slowly started to make sense of the low-lying background noise as the people who represented the rich started to eat and make conversation. I found the hand of someone stroking my back and I felt tears that had subconsciously arisen slide down my cheeks and into my beard. I was angry. My body pulsed with hate: hate of ignorance, hate of greed, hate of wealth, and hate of the life that I had lived without blinking. I hated the activity and kept repeating to myself, “It isn’t a game. This is real life.”  I stayed silent for the rest of the evening pushing myself to give just a little bit of input as we debriefed about the activity, but the only thing that produced from my mouth was incoherent and inexplainable thought. The activity had done its purpose, and the image of that girl will live in my mind and haunt my heart. It is that image that will be ever-present in my mind while I strive toward placing a little piece of good somewhere in this world.