Students feel the pangs of the hungry

As she sat at a table laden with Sbarro's pizza, Steak Escape sandwiches, salad, chips and juice, junior electrical engineering major Natalie Salaets started to get uncomfortable. Barely 15 feet from her, most of the students in the Charles Carroll Room in the Stamp Student Union were sitting on the floor, unenthusiastically eyeing the bowl of plain rice that was to be their dinner.

"I really felt guilty being up here, especially because I'm not that hungry," Salaets said.

Salaets and more than 100 other students packed the room Wednesday night for the Hunger Banquet, sponsored by the Gemstone-Ellicott Service Committee, MaryPIRG, the Asian American Student Association, Oxfam America UMD, Alpha Phi Omega and the Office of Community Service-Learning.

Those who attended the event, which was designed to bring attention to poverty during Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, received cards randomly designating them as high, middle or low income. High income students, representing 15 percent of the world's population, were served at tables. The middle income students, representing 35 percent, sat in chairs and ate fried rice and beans in their laps. The remaining students, the lower class, made do with plain rice on the floor. Women, who suffer disproportionately from poverty and hunger, had to wait last in line for food.

"This just sucks," said sophomore neurobiology and physiology major Osi Sanchez, as she waited to get food. "Maybe if it was fair, but just because I'm a girl and I have to wait for the guys and then go after the scraps, it really makes you feel like an animal, like a vulture. It really makes me feel for women in poverty."

While this event is not new to the campus, this year's Hunger Banquet emphasized the local aspect of poverty and homelessness with talks by government and politics professor Dorith Grant-Wisdom, Angela McArdell, from the Washington-based non-profit Community of Hope, and Vincent Strobe, a site coordinator for Food for All.

McArdell emphasized the challenges faced by the 12,000 people who are homeless in the Washington area. Community of Hope helps to find housing for homeless and low-income Washington residents, many of whom have been forced to the streets by skyrocketing housing prices, she said.

"If you are in the bottom rung, housing in D.C. has gotten way out of reach," McArdell said.

Strobe, whose organization delivers food to those in need across Washington, made a passionate appeal for students to get involved in their communities since hunger afflicts those in the United States as well as in the developing world.

"The media brings the world to us, but it doesn't bring it to us locally," Strobe said. "So we might see what's happening in Cambodia or East Africa, but we might not see what's happening down the street."

Event organizer Sarah Peitzmeier, of the Gemstone-Ellicott Service Committee, said she hoped McArdell and Strobe educated students about hunger issues close to campus.

Sophomore government and politics major Saba Gyemfi heard that message.

"I think the local organizations are what really interest me, because I have a connection with these people who are only 15 minutes away," she said.

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