Hunger pangs help Utah teens work up empathy for poor

"I just really want a big old thing of pizza," says the boy.

He is sitting in the sanctuary of Southeast Baptist Church on Friday evening and he is starving, or as close to starving as a well-fed Salt Lake Valley teenager can be. He hasn't eaten for 15 hours and there is no prospect of any food for 15 hours more. Tonight he will sleep in a cardboard box in the church's gym.

This is the 30-Hour Famine, an annual eye-opener for healthy, relatively affluent American teens. The idea is to give the students a glimpse of what it's like to be hungry and poor and to raise money for the international relief organization World Vision.

Now in its 16th year, the event has raised more than $100 million worldwide. This year, Salt Lake teens from five area churches — Southeast Baptist, Mount Olympus Presbyterian, First Presbyterian, Holladay Baptist and Our Saviour's Lutheran — raised more than $25,000.

As the evening began Friday, the teenagers each received a new identity, as a real boy or girl living in rural Indonesia, the victims of droughts, floods and the 2004 tsunami that left families without land or livelihoods.

Braxton Hodges, a 14-year-old who attends Southeast Baptist, became 11-year-old Octavianus, who suffers from malaria. To have malaria means being bone-tired, so to get an idea of what that might feel like Braxton had to walk around all evening wearing a backpack filled with eight Baptist hymnals.

Kaily Gumpper, an 18-year-old who attends Mount Olympus Presbyterian, became a blind 10-year-old named Nini, so she spent the evening wearing a scarf over her eyes. Other disabilities were created with masking tape — around a knee to simulate a paralyzed leg, across the nose for respiratory problems caused by pollution.

"Forget you live in Salt Lake City. Let your identity soak in," Jamie White instructed the teenagers. White, director of youth ministry at Mount Olympus, is a lively, straight-talking woman who can make hunger both a game and something serious to ponder.

In one of the games, blindfolded students had to crawl around on the floor trying to find a banana or little bag of rice. "Imagine living through a drought," White said, "and you haven't eaten anything for three days and there's no water."

"Can I open the banana?" asked one of the teenagers, wistfully.

In another game, "Mosquito Menace," the teenagers tried not to be touched by a line of their blindfolded compatriots. If they were touched they got a colored dot — and it was only later that White explained that this meant they had contracted malaria. And then the really bad news: If their dot was yellow, they had died.