Every year, students from my high school, Villa Angela- St. Joseph, get involved in our 30-Hour Hunger and Homeless Experience. Who am I? I am Daniela Abreo, a senior and fourth year participant in the event. Sure, 30 hours of not eating may seem like a magnanimous amount of time to you or me, who probably eat at least three meals a day. However, 30 hours is not much time for those who go days, weeks, even months with the constant pain of hunger reminding them every second how much hungrier they are now than they were a moment ago.

I go home and I have a family and a nice warm bed and a roof over my head. How many people do we pass daily who hold up a Styrofoam cup trying to get just a few cents to get by?

So why do I participate in this exercise? It isn’t to feel guilty. On the contrary, it is to help me to realize how blessed I really am. Every time I participate, it helps me to put things into perspective. I realize how many things I really do take for granted. Through this I can focus on a problem that doesn’t just affect the homeless, but all of us. Though I may never truly experience the life of a homeless person, participating in the Hunger and Homeless Experience helps me to see what it is like without the comfort of food, pillows and lockers.

As a participant, we get evicted from our lockers and have to carry all of our books for the day all day long. Trust me, when you have to carry a calc book and physics book around, you definitely feel it. Following the end of a back-breaking day of school, all of us gather for various activities and simulations to help learn about and raise our awareness of poverty and homelessness.

One activity we’ve done almost every year is that we are given a schedule to fill out of a basic day in our lives. We are then given a real schedule of another person who is in poverty and whose life varies greatly from our own. The situations are usually children at the age of seven and eight working manually to help support their family, and who barely have enough food to survive on. This activity is a huge eye opener for many students. It is devastating just knowing that someone your age will never get to go to school and will always have to work a hard for the rest of their lives.

We also typically watch a movie on hunger awareness. This year, we watched “God Save the Children.” It was an amazing film on the terrible poverty cycle that most people can never get out of. We found that most of the help that poverty-stricken people get is just enough to help them survive, but not enough to actually get out of poverty.
Every year I learn something new. I’ve really enjoyed participating in this because not only do I get to experience and raise hunger homeless awareness, I get to meet other people who feel the same way I do. The most important lesson for me is no matter how bad you think you have it, there is always someone out there who is going through much more difficult struggles than you. Count your blessings every day.

The next day, we all wake up early and finally get to the best part of the whole experience – action. First you raise awareness and want to help, and then you act upon it. We all sign up to go to various sites for helping the less fortunate such as the Food Bank, St. Aloysius, and the Salvation Army. As a Marianist school, we are taught that community is the most important thing. We go out to lead and serve, as our Alma Matter echoes. We volunteer our time to help those in need, to reach out to our community, the poor and homeless, for we are all one community.

The Hunger and Homeless Experience has taught me lessons that will be incorporated in my way of living for the rest of my life. Counting your blessings and always being aware of hunger and homelessness is key, but to then go out and help someone less fortunate is the next step. We all can do our part, and becoming an active member in the community is what brings us all together.