Day 5: Operation Hunger

I had a Semester at Sea trip today called Operation Hunger. We went to a pre school and we weighed the kids. Then we had to figure out their z-score by calculating their exact age and weight. It turned out that most of the kids were underweight and malnourished. They didn’t look too skinny though. The kids in Ghana were definitely a lot skinnier than these kids. We had time to play with the kids and that was fun. I sat down and the kids swarmed. They were all trying to sit on my lap and it just about knocked me over. They were really cute.
Next we went to a soup kitchen in a township. A township is a really poor area where black and colored people live. It started out during the apartheid when the government forced black and colored people to live in townships and a large portion of the population still lives like that. The townships consist of a community of shacks built with metal. The townships are really dangerous and there are high crime rates. I believe nearly 50% of the black population of South Africa is unemployed and AIDS is a severe problem. The soup kitchen we went to was run independently by a woman at her home. We helped serve soup and bread and then went to another soup kitchen. This one was also in a township and it was outside. Again we helped serve the food and then headed back to the ship. They ran the soup kitchen 2-3 times a week because that’s all they can afford. People brought their own containers for the soup and it was kind of surprising how many people didn’t have bowls. I saw very few bowls the whole day. People brought tupperware, lunch boxes, cups, and empty containers of all sorts.
Once I got back to the ship, I changed into warmer clothes because it was freezing outside and then I went shopping. I ended up running into Nancy who just got back from her safari so we went to dinner and caught each other up on the last couple days.