As our schedule for May is pretty full, we recognized the 4th Girl Guides of Canada Make A Difference Day a bit early. May 28th is World Hunger Day, so we had an evening about hunger awareness.
What is hunger? Hunger is a condition that results from not getting enough food and nutrients to live a healthy, active life. When we think of hunger, we often thing of the feeling we get when we haven't eaten for a while. We all know this feeling, but people who suffer from chronic hunger cannot satisfy this feeling by just having a meal or snack. People in this situation may not know when they will be able to eat again.
According to the World Food Programme, chronic hunger affects more than 795 million people - that's 1 in 9 people - around the world. Although we might think of developing countries when we think of hunger, according to Food Banks Canada, about 13 percent - or slightly more than 1 in 10 people - in Canada struggle with food insecurity and lack access to enough safe, good-quality and nutritious food. Hunger and poverty also affect children more than adults. In 2015, 1 in 5 children in Canada were living in poverty.
As usual we started with 30 minutes of Patrol Time, working on the Canada 150 Challenge.
- Daffodil - Worked on Canadian-themed puzzles and games (wordsearches, fill-ins, mazes, sudoku)
- Trillium - Planned to start off by learning about Inuit Culture and making a quiliq, but ran out of time so learned about the Arms of Canada and began design their own Coats of Arms
- Pansy -Worked on Canadian-themed puzzles and games (wordsearches, fill-ins, mazes, sudoku)
- Rose - Started off with a game of hockey, followed by other games using newspaper
After cleaning up, we had our usual opening, followed by an active game.
Our first activity was to create a Hunger Tree to explore our thoughts about hunger. We drew a large tree on paper and stuck it up on the back of a door, then added our thoughts in different colours. We used blue marker to add thoughts about why we need food, red marker to add thoughts about how else food is important in our lives, and green marker to add thoughts on what it feels like to be hungry.
We then did an activity to learn about Buying Power and how it relates to hunger. Each Patrol was asked to come up with a menu to feed 4 people for one day. They were then given a budget and a variety of grocery store flyers to create a shopping list for the week, including everything needed to prepare their planned meals.One group was given a budget of $24, another $75, and a third an unlimited amount. The fourth group was given a budget of $100, but had to shop from the list of food prices in Northern/Remote communities. Two of the groups completed the activities successfully (albeit over-budget), while the other two stayed under-budget but hadn't taken quantities into consideration in their planning.
The final activity was a game called Obstacles to Access One player is It (Hunger) and she tries to tag other players. When she tags someone, they become an obstacle to accessing food, for example:
- Not having enough money to buy food
- Lack of transportation to get food
- Not being able to grow food
- Not having a place to keep or store food
- Homelessness
- Unemployment
- Illness
When the game ends, discuss how it is not always just one thing that causes a person or family to experience hunger, but often the build up of several different factors.
We ended the meeting with reminders for next week (Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-Up) and Taps.
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