Last weekend I dined on gruel. The meal was part of an annual conference on international development, where a random draw determines whether you have a grand meal or a miserable repast that is the lot the world's poor.
The "feast," as it was billed, took place in the cafeteria at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., part of a network of American Christian colleges. Calvin has its roots but also its present identity in the Dutch-origin Christian Reformed Church. Service is a deeply engrained tenet and many students come from missionary families; the college sends many students abroad.
The conference, which draws students from other colleges in the network, is part of this tradition and ethos. As a keynote speaker, I was asked to speak about partnerships, particularly on Christian humanitarian and development work in partnership with non-Christian groups.
I was impressed by the students' keen interest in fighting poverty and their attempts to translate their faith and convictions into reality. The "broken bread poverty meal" was a high point. The format followed a World Vision program but was tweaked a bit to highlight the effects of food price increases.
Everyone received an envelope as they came in: yellow, red, or blue. Each group was shepherded to a different section to read their instructions. There was considerable giggling among the students but everyone went along.
Each envelope included "reality checks" to buy food. My yellow group, half of the diners, representing the low-income half of the world's population, received seven checks, while the richest group got 25. We were advised not to try the lines with red beans and rice or the pricier menus with more choice and quantity because we had too few checks. Our checks could buy gruel (soy protein porridge) and a drink or dessert. But as we approached the line, we heard that the price had gone up. And there was no dessert to be had. So it was gruel or nothing.
The groups combined after getting food, so each table had privileged reds and blues as well as the yellow gruel eaters. The message was reinforced by sad stories of hungry, desolate people in various countries read aloud by the yellow group.
The student organizers broke in periodically with explanations. They stressed that both money and information are unequal: the richer groups were told that food prices were likely to increase, so they could plan accordingly. The poor were told nothing and their supplies were predictably unpredictable. The event ended with a speech cum sermon by a church activist that highlighted two themes: hunger statistics have faces behind them, and each of us has a personal responsibility for doing something about the world's hunger problems.
A perpetual frustration for those committed to fighting world poverty is how distant the problem seems from our own comfortable vantage point. The feast of gruel brought it a tiny bit closer.
