Rice for Thought

Hello, everyone. I am back again for another round of "Food for Thought". Thanks to everyone for commenting on my first post. I always love responses! (^_^)

Today I am not doing "Food for Thought" so much as "Rice for Thought". Now, what do people think of when they think of rice? When I think of rice, I think of the tiny little Jade Cafe with its giant jade buddha sitting about a ten minutes' drive from my house. And I can't say I like it. I've never much liked Chinese food or rice. My original hatred of rice came from the time (not so long ago) that I wore braces, for a total of four years. Rice always got stuck in my braces, and I absolutely hated it!

But today the meaning of rice came to me in a different way. It came to me from a website, simply called http://www.freerice.com. This site was mentioned today when I met with an organization I am in called People-to-People International. The title is self-explanatory for the group: the goal of People-to-People is to connect people to each other from around the world and to talk and address world issues. One of the members of my group talked today about freerice.com. The FreeRice website is about, rather plainly, giving free rice away. When you open up the site, you have the option of playing a game which is basically an SAT vocabulary course. The game gives you a word and you have to choose the correct synonym (i.e. "leisurely" is a synonym to "unhurried"). For every word you answer correctly, you donate 20 grains of rice to the FreeRice organization. FreeRice then distributes the rice to families around the world who are in need for food. FreeRice pays for the rice using the advertisements that appear on the page when you play the game.

I love this site. In the past 6 or so hours that I've known about it, I've managed to donate about 3000 grains of rice. How many meals does that feed, I wonder? Probably not a lot, but with my 3000 added to the other donations from people who accessed the site, I imagine the total accumulation of rice will be quite high. The site is simplistic in its methods and its goals, and it is absolutely brilliant. Plus, us poor juniors get added help for the SAT! (I take my first SAT this May! *gasps in horror and hides in a corner*)

And this site got me thinking about rice. I don't even like rice. If I had to have dinner and choose between rice and anything else, I would choose anything else. But the thing is...there's a good portion of the world that doesn't have anything else. I just can't comprehend that. We live such a plush life in America, and I can't imagine having to live off rice EVERY day! Gag! I'd probably go insane! But the same person who mentioned FreeRice.com to my People-to-People meeting also pointed out that in last year's statistics, over 820 million people are starving. Over 56 million children go to school hungry. A bowl of rice donated by some kid studying for their SAT in May is a miracle to these people.

It seems to me that nobody ever talks about the hungry in America. It's over there, so why worry about it? There'll be people who go "oh, of course I care about the starving!" when you ask them, but they talk the talk without walking the walk. But there are dozens of charities like freerice.com that actually do something to help. But unfortunately, no one ever hears about them! Non-profit organizations like this can't afford to display commercials everywhere, and the media would rather talk about the latest serial killer in Chicago or the latest bomb killing children in Iraq than the good things like these charities. There's no one left to promote these charities except the people themselves.

So why am I writing this journal? Maybe just giving simple observations, but this time I'm doing an all-out promotion: go to freerice.com. Just give it a shot.

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