Local Celebrity speaks out...

Well, not exactly, but it almost seemed like that by the way everyone came up to me to comment on my TV spot. See, during the 30 Hour Famine, Mariza Reyes from Channel 6 came in with a cameraman and they interviewed me (as well as several of the kids) about the famine. They also taped some of the action as we did one of our first awareness activities. That night, we all watched the 10:00 news, expecting a little blurb at the end, but instead we got several minutes of good coverage. They didn't twist our message or anything (it could have looked ugly; here we had a group of kids who were voluntarily starving themselves, and I was their cult leader).

Some highlights included watching the kids take on different personas for the Famine: they were all members of the Maasi people (a nomadic people group who live in Kenya & Tanzania). Most of them had an infirmity of some kind (including AIDS, blindness, missing an arm, unable to bend a knee, and hunger), and they had to figure out how to express that. For example, the blind one had to wear a blindfold (duh) and the HIV+ ones had to wear an arm band (one of the kids had to leave to go to work, so we just said that he'd died of AIDS). They had to learn how to function with their disabilities. Funny thing that I just thought about: the group who didn't have "disabilities" but were hungry (they expressed this by wearing heavy backpacks to show how hunger makes everything harder) -- they were excited that they didn't have "disabilities" but they ended up losing most of the competitions because it was really hard to do everything with that backpack on.

Another highlight was the excitement of the kids coming back after a 45 minute food scavenger hunt (for a local food pantry). Seeing what they had gotten really was cool, especially since it will feed people locally.

Another highlight was breakfast. YUM!

Seeing that it's almost 7:00 and company is coming (well, not really company; they are almost family), I'll wrap this up. I still haven't counted how much we raised for the Famine, especially since half the kids forgot to bring their money, but I'll put an update in when I count.