Leave the gun take the cannoli (9)

Its amazing how quickly adolescents grasp the concept of social justice.  While contemplating their  place in the world and defining their own  value system teenagers cultivate compassion  for the outcast and disenfranchized.  

Recently, 12 year old  Bea Genco and I  had a very erudite dicussion about the lack of clean drinking water in Africa and the number of starving children throughout the world.  She posed some very sophisticated questions regarding humanitaran aid  and government involvement in feeding the poor.    She wondered how  individuals with limited resources could  make a difference in  the world.  So, I showed her two of my favorite web sites;  Charity: water (http://www.charitywater.org) and FreeRice (http://freerice.com).

Charity: water sells bottled  water for $20 and 100%  of the proceeds go toward digging wells in  Africa.  FreeRice is an English vocabulary building site that   helps to fight hunger through the UN Food Program by donating 20 grains of rice for every word the user  gets right.   This site is sponsored by advertising revenue.  FreeRice is fun and I  spend a few hours on it whenever my insomnia kicks in.

I challenged Bea to go to FreeRice and try to learn 100 new words.  I told her if she could donate 500 grains of rice in 10 days I would buy a bottle of water for her from Charity: water.     Bea had so much fun playing around on FreeRice that she donated 13,820 grains in 7 days.        

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 12:49 am and is filed under the disenfranchised, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.