Today is my second day doing the 30 Hour Famine. It’s my second time doing it; I did it years and years ago in high school and we all camped out at the school and had plenty to keep us from thinking about how hungry we were. This time I decided to do it by myself, and unfortunately it coincided with Sweet’s trip to Minneapolis, so I’ve spent the entire time home alone and it’s been slightly harder. But I decided to use the time wisely, and in addition to cleaning my house and picking up some new contacts, I educated myself a little bit more about the cause I’m doing this for.

I found out a tonne of statistics and watched a bunch of documentaries that just moved me to tears.

• Number of people in the world who suffer from chronic malnutrition: 923 million
• Percentage of children living in poverty in the world: almost 50
• Estimated number of daily child deaths linked to extreme poverty: nearly 30,000
• Number of people worldwide who do not have access to safe water: 1.1 billion
• Number of people who die each year of water-related diseases: 5 million
• Number of children forced to flee their homes and live as refugees: 9 million
• Number child soldiers worldwide: 300,000
• Number of people under 25 who become HIV-positive every minute: Four
• Number of people who die each day due to AIDS: 5,753
• 1 in 8,000 women in the UK die during childbirth; in Africa, the figure is 1 in 8
• Malaria kills a million children in Africa each year, and the worst thing is it’s an entirely preventable disease, and a malaria net only costs $10.

I watched a documentary on a group of people climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, which was SO inspirational. 1 in 3 people who try and climb it don’t make it, and they went through months of training and fundraising to try and raise a million for malaria nets. Over 7 days they struggled through exhaustion and altitude sickness but they made it, and ended up raising THREE million, which was just incredible. I have a copy of the documentary – if anyone’s interested, I’d be more than happy to share. I think you can also find it here in clips on YouTube. Just seeing the footage of people whose children have started off so promising, doing well in school, and then being affected by the disease and wasting away, and eventually dying after a grandmother has carried them for miles to try and find the nearest clinic. It’s heartbreaking. I can’t even imagine. We are so lucky to be living in this country, and people complain about our health service and about the costs of things but we have no right to. I wish people would just take a second to imagine what life would be like if they’d been born in a country like Uganda, had no access to hospitals or medicine, safe water, or even a malaria net. We have so much to be thankful for, and right now I am thankful to everyone who donated to this 30 Hour Famine. If you have a second, you can send a net, and save a life.

Anyway, onto the rest of the week. We’re still buried in snow and it’s still making me want to move away every single day, but things are looking brighter for next week and I’m ever looking forward to summer. I had my first Reiki session on Wednesday, which was slightly bizarre, I spent an hour lying down while the therapist waved her arms around my body and then told me afterwards things that were frighteningly accurate in terms of issues I’d had, things I was dealing with, and I’d never mentioned a word of them to her. Very interesting evening!! I also had my first proper April Fool’s Day at work, which was TONNES of fun; I arrived to my desk and all my photos had been replaced with pictures of a very pregnant co-worker from the 90s; I had someone return a call from “Mr Lyon” and listed the number of the Winnipeg Zoo, there was Vaseline on earpieces, nametags set in jelly and keyboards’ keys all switched around… all in all a very fun day. 🙂 I got some freelance work this week too, which came at a REALLY good time (although I did turn into a bit of a hermit as a result), so I think next week is just going to be a lot of catching up with friends, and making up for lost time with the boy. Oh, and as of six hours from now, eating a great big cinnamon bun 🙂