Free Rice

"They were hungry and thirsty, and their lives ebbed away." Psalm 107:5

"According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children." FreeRice.com wants to change that and improve our language skills at the same time.

According to the site, FreeRice has two goals:

#1: Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.

#2: Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

How does this generate money? Through corporate sponsors, who advertise on the site.

How do you get involved? Go to the site and play the interactive vocabulary game. There is a word given, followed by 4 other words. Click on the answer that best defines the word given. If you get it right, you get a harder one. If you get it wrong, you get an easier one. For each word you get right, FreeRice will donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. There is a cool graphic of rice filling up a bowl as you answer correctly, and if you answer enough of them correctly you start to get, or rather, give, little piles of rice! Myanmar, Nepal, and Cambodia are in the top 10 recepient countries that receive donations. The rice is also purchased from "developing countries, keeping the cost of reaching the hungry to a minimum and boosting farmers’ efforts to grow their own food." (quote from www.wfp.com)

How big an issue is world hunger? For those of us who might have guessed that world hunger is declining, consider the following sobering statistic from the site:

"Since the second half of the 1990s, the number of chronically hungry in developing countries has been increasing at a rate of almost four million per year.Today, one in nearly seven people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life, making hunger and malnutrition the number one risk to health worldwide -- greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined."

Is is effective? Consider that according to Wikipedia, “One month after the inception of the viral marketing program, users had earned enough points for one billion grains of rice. The United Nation's World Food Programme stated that this amount could feed 50,000 people for one day. Thus, approximately 20,000 grains of rice provide enough caloric intake to sustain an adult for one day. Using this calculation, enough rice is donated to feed 7,019.15 people daily per the totals for December 28, 2007.

Is it addictive? I'm just getting started, but a fun interactive game that improves your vocabulary and helps feed the hungry? Sounds better than doing one more "Can you name this Disney villan?" quiz on Facebook. Challenge yourself to spend a few minutes a day making a difference.

"...and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. (Isaiah 58:10 NIV)