Imagine what it would be like if you could not eat for a day. It would not be as though you were unable to eat, but food would simply not be available. For hours you could think about food, picture it in your mouth as you savour it, but there would be nothing there. Your stomach would ache, your head would grow light, and your energy would falter. No matter what you did, where you turned, you could not eat anything. Now imagine if that day was like every single day of your life.

For a Key Club project, I volunteered to participate in the 30-Hour Famine. The purpose of it was to raise funds through UNICEF for starving people, specifically children, in Africa, by having people pledge money for every hour I do not eat. I have always been one to try and put myself in someone else's shoes, so I figured that I should try out the project.

At first I worried because I love food; I have been known to eat entire boxes of cereal in one sitting. However, I figured I could use this to my advantage not only by gaining community service hours, but also by trying to lose some weight gained during my Valentine's Day candy binge. I tried to situate the span of time in which I could not eat so that eight of those hours could be spent sleeping.

I ate as much as I could during lunchtime, saying goodbye to mastication for thirty hours. The rest of the school day went by fine. At home, I missed dinner, which was truly missed, but uneaten nonetheless.

Then it started getting worse. I awoke the next day and could not to eat breakfast before going to my job for a full day of work. I did not simply labour for eight hours, but I also worked in a restaurant as a waitress, so I had to walk around only being able to look on as everyone ate the food I had to carry out. Hungry African people do not have food to fawn over, but they do not have food at all.

As the trial neared its end, I decided to look into the actual problem. Upon going onto the Internet and looking up information, I was horrified at pictures of starving people, living skeletons whose arms were hardly the size of sticks. Over 800 million people around the world receive insufficient nutrition, and one in five of them is a child;15 million children under the age of five die each year because of hunger.

In the end, I had three hours of community service and the beginning of an understanding of some of the most unfortunate, needy people of the world. The project got me thinking about how difficult the lives of some African people are. Today I remain dedicated to supporting the hungry with donations and community service, and continue to keep my eyes open to the dilemma of hunger.

In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty" *

Every year 15 million children die of hunger *

For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years *

Throughout the 1990's more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days! *

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving. Over 4 million will die this year. *

One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture *

The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world. Hunger in Global Economy *

Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. UNICEF *

3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day. *

In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet. *

In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children. *

The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants. *

One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night. *

Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished. *

In 1997 alone, the lives of at least 300,000 young children were saved by vitamin A supplementation programmes in developing countries. *

Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death *

About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age *

To satisfy the world's sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year. *

The assets of the world's three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet. *

Every 3.6 seconds, someone dies of hunger *

It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.