BY: DIANA MARIN & EMILY VENTURA Child Hunger

About child hunger… Child hunger is when kids of all ages that are suffering from hunger, which is primarily because they are poor or homeless. Many of these children are suffering from marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition with oedema, as well as dehydration or severe malaria. Malnutrition has severe effects in children; it affects children not only physically but mentally also because it’s hard for them to learn. Marasmus is a type of disease that you get when you don’t have enough nutrients in your body; it causes severe weight loss leaving just skin and bones. Kwashiorkor it’s when your body accumulates water which leaves the appearance of being bloated.

Why Child Hunger? We chose child hunger because sometimes when you mention or think about child hunger you automatically think of adults and forget it affects kids as well. We got interested in helping kids without food or shelter because it hurts us that they are someone’s children, cousins, or even grandchildren and its sad seeing them live like that.

What we did What we did at first is host a family car wash, and raised a total amount of $50 which we donated to Kids’ Meals. We did a food drive in our school to help kids who suffer from hunger. We built boxes for every homeroom teacher to have in their room so students could donate cans. At the end, we collected a total of 500 cans to donate to the organization Kids’ Meals. On December 5 th we went to Kids’ Meals to volunteer from 9am to 12pm. While we were there, we made sandwiches for kids and we got to meet new people. Kids’ Meals serves healthy lunches to over 1,700 hungry pre-school aged children, living in poverty.

What we did…

Raising awareness We raised awareness by presenting our tri-fold board on I Fest and explaining to people about child hunger, the causes of it, and how they could go and volunteer to actually help kids.

More pictures…

Global & local connections The global connection was that with us volunteering we made sandwiches for 1,700 kids around the world. We help them not starve from hunger and live another day with lunch, even though it was just a sandwich, juice box, and a snack. Another local connection was that we made a food drive in our school and we encourage kids to donate canned food for children in need. Also we made a family car wash which our family donated $5 for each car we clean to donate to the “Kids Meal” organization.

Greatest success Our biggest success was that at the end of our food drive we collected a total of 500 cans! Also we called Kids’ Meals Organization to go volunteer on December 5 th from 9am to 12pm

Greatest challenge  Our biggest challenge was inspiring students to donate canned foods because they weren’t that interested. We had to be really organized on our time and since students weren’t really donating we had to extend the food drive an extra one week. Also in getting a scheduled date to go volunteer at Kids’ Meals, because the only days we could volunteer where Monday-Friday so we had to miss a school day.

Learned about the world I've learned that I am very lucky to have a meal every day, because some children are born with parents that can’t provide food to their table and we’re already used to knowing that we will eat the next day but while we already know we’re not going to starve for tomorrow, other kids already know that they’ll starve once again. We take food for granted because we all know that you can eat even with $1 every day, but some kids aren’t as fortunate to even find leftovers of food to eat for a whole day. There are many organizations around the world to stop the cause of child hunger but people don’t really pay attention to the problem as much as, for example material stuff, while we’re buying things that we don’t need we could all be donating to make a difference in a kids life. I think government is the cause of this, because instead of helping people they always focus on war which leads to a lot of money put into it which then leads to citizens left unemployed so they cant even support their family anymore.

Learned about ourselves This project changed our views in different things, at first we didn’t think about how many children suffer from hunger and we didn’t really take it seriously. When we did the food drive, we noticed that a lot of people cared and brought a lot of food cans to help children. It also helped us realize how lucky we are to have a at least 3 meals every day, and to appreciate everything that we have.

Changing the world We changed the world by helping the Kids’ Meal organization to make sandwiches and helping them feed 1,700 kids to help reduce the number of children suffering from hunger. We also changed the world by donating the 500 cans to the organization so they can have more support from the people and be easier for them to help fight hunger.

Conclusion We have learned a lot from our Capstone class, we have gone out and volunteered and actually made a difference. At first it was really hard because we thought we were never going to finish our work due to the fact that we were new to typing long papers. But we successes in every challenge that we had in capstone, starting from getting our food drive proposal approved from Ms.Le-thai and doing 6-8 pages for research paper. We learned to get organized with our work and to turn things on time. It changed our perspective over child hunger because now we are more aware of it and we know how to help prevent it.

Bibliography "20 Facts About Child Hunger And Child Poverty That Will Break Your Heart." The Economic Collapse. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Sept "Nutrition." Action Against Hunger. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2013) “Volunteer - Kids Meals dHouston." Volunteer - Kids Meals Houston. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2013”).