Guest blogger Maria “Rose” Belding
is a senior at Pella High School in Pella, Iowa. Maria is a social justice
writer, advocate and one of the youngest selected candidates in the history of
the Wallace-Carver Fellowship Program for scientific research. In this blog
she writes about playing the ‘middleman’ in an Oxfam America Hunger Banquet,
which is a special role invented by supporters in Iowa. The middleman serves as gatekeeper to an
extra helping of dinner, driving a hard bargain with participants. This simulates the unfair terms by which many
in poverty must negotiate access to needed markets, goods, and services.
I am an Oxfam America Hunger Banquet veteran. I have
participated in events with 500 attendees and with 20, dinners held in formal
ballrooms and in school cafeterias, and sat on the floor and stood at the
podium. The dramatic contrasts between the rice on the carpet and the
cheesecake on the table are no longer shocking to me, just sad; I am prepared
for the opening speech, closing remarks and the radical shift in perspective
that occurs in between.
This weekend, however, at what marked my tenth Hunger
Banquet, I still found myself surprised.
As a returning alumni to the World Food Prize Foundation’s
Global Youth Institute, I was volunteering as staff for the weekend and helped
set up the Banquet. As we began to divvy up duties for the evening, I was asked
to be the Middleman, essentially the only role I had not played in my multiple
forays into the world of simulated wealth allocation.
I accepted the chance as a challenge: could I really be as
mean as many middlemen had been to me?
Turns out, I could be and was. I was shocked by how easily I
could manipulate participants into committing truly terrible acts, even though
fictional ones. Asking the students and their teachers to behave as though they
really were living the lives described on the colored cards that decided their
fates, I was easily able to leverage what little assets or power they had. A
woman who ran a shop in Afghanistan agreed to report back on the conversations
of the American soldiers who stopped by her store in exchange for two meals. A
recovering drug addict gave me access to his former circles and acted as a
mule. Men sold me their sisters and sisters sold their sons. Actions we would
all think unthinkable were considered or taken, even if it meant the loss of
life.
I did as I was told I should; this was what was supposed to
happen. The point was made, and the students and teachers learned.
Nobody warned me how bad I’d feel about it.
As I said earlier, the fact that hunger fuels desperation
was not a new revelation for me. But being on the other side of the negotiating
table showed me how easy it is to break all other rules when the first law of
our biology has been transgressed - when we cannot give our bodies the fuel to
function, all else is fair game if it will get us to what we need to survive.
If we want to rid the world of its horrors, of genocides and human trafficking
and drug trades, the best course of action will not be
monitoring these atrocities and punishing the few offenders we can catch and
convict. Instead, our greatest investment would be in feeding those who are not
evil but may be forced to do evil things.
War is not always about weapons, and hunger is not always
about food - but if we can prevent both by better allocating our resources,
perhaps we can right the wrong after all.
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| The author (left), pictured at the Hunger Banquet in Des Moines with her business partner Tariro Makoni, fellow advocate. In addition to their work on engaging youth, the pair are also co-creators of the M.E.A.N.S Database, a system that allows food shelves to better communicate regarding surplus food. |
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