Sleeping on a bed

The three days went by quite fast.

Wednesday:

I had stayed up until 2am Tuesday night buying food, creating last minute handouts, and finishing up as much homework for the week as I could. I woke up at 6:45am Wednesday morning to finish up packing and getting ready for the Challenge. My nephew, Noe, arrived at my house around 7:45am to accompany me to Costco where I would meet a Supervisor and pick up cardboard boxes for the event. The cardboard was then delivered by my dad and brother-in-law to PLNU while my nephew and I attended biotechnology class at 8:30am. My six year old nephew was shadowing me for the day (teaching him about poverty and living on $2 a day or less). Noe was such a good sport he helped with the food preparations and building my cardboard home. Noe had lunch with Anthony while the other Challenge participants enjoyed bean tostadas with lettuce and sour cream. Later I found out that Noe had a hamburger, pasta, grilled cheese, pudding, and 2 ice cream cones! I don’t know how he ate that much, so unhealthy… After lunch Noe flew kites Rufio, a PLNU alumni that was joining us for the Challenge. He absolutely loved Rufio. Noe stayed until about 4:30pm, which was good timing since I started to feel quite sick after that. Dinner was beans and rice, Rufio and Jen helped prepare the meal. (I forgot to mention- a group walked to Fresh & Easy at 3pm to buy food for the next day)

While everyone was having dinner I took a short nap under my “house”. I began to feel cold and super uneasy, then I felt I needed to relieve my stomach. I ran to the bathroom and barely made it, all my food came up :( I briefly talked to Anthony on the phone to let him know I wasn’t feeling well. While on the phone I could contain my tears. I didn’t want to give up on the Challenge but at the same time I knew I had to go home to prevent any liability issues if something were to happen to me. I prayed about it and tried to sleep it off. Anthony arrived at 11pm to drop of Rob, the staff that would be staying on campus. He offered to take me home but I refused and told him I was feeling better. I am glad I did.

Reflection:

Looking back on this day, I didn’t have enough to drink for all the moving around I was doing- I was dehydrated. I was also stressed about making sure all the details for the food and what not were in place. But I am glad I didn’t feel well. The reason I say this is because in a sense my situation allowed me to think about the many challenges that people in a developing country have to face. I didn’t have enough water consumption because all our water had to be boiled. It took us a while to get the water boiled, and ready for people to drink, in that processed I must have forgotten to drink some myself. I also didn’t want to take any medication since that would put me over my $2 budget. My not feeling so well also put me to question how dedicated I was actually going to be. Right after I got off the phone with Anthony my mom called to check up on me. Before I told her how I was feeling, she started giving me all sort of food advice for the meals I was going to prepare for Thursday. After the short conversation I had with her I knew I couldn’t give up. If I had left it would have let down both the fellow participants and my family that was rooting for me (especially my nephew). So I sucked it up and choose to stay, I don’t regret it.

Thursday:

The rise of the sun woke me up naturally. It was such a good feeling to feel tired after the sun set and be ready to go once the sun rose. Now in days we don’t pay attention to nature we work until it’s late because we have artificial light and get up according to our plans for the day. I woke up in time to help make breakfast, there were three helpers already there preparing hard boiled eggs and toast. We were trying to get the breakfast out by 7am so we accidently undercooked some of the eggs. They were a little runny but people didn’t complain they just ate them :)

I attended both my classes for that day, theater and econometrics. It felt a little weird to look “bummy” while everyone else was nicely groomed. For lunch we had rice and beans. I have to say I am a good bean cooker, a talent I never knew I had. I babysat on Thursday evening so I didn’t get to help with dinner, baked potatoes. When I came back from babysitting, from 2-7pm, I ate a potato, so good! We had a debrief session at 9pm to get to know one another and talk about why we were doing the challenge. I forgot to mention that our group shrank from the 80+ people that signed up to 35 people who actually committed to doing the Challenge. I was relieved in a sense to get a smaller group since this meant less cooking and more intimacy with one another. The debrief session really intrigued me we had almost all the majors at Loma represented. And in my head I broke the participants into four groups:

1. Those who had travelled abroad and had personally seem people live on less than $2 a day.

2. Those who were active with local homeless organizations

3. Commuters who cared about the cause but were also glad to stay on campus (save on gas & time) and get their meals covered for $2 a day

4. Those who just wanted to have a giant sleepover under the stars and enjoy time with friends

Friday:

For breakfast we each had a banana and a cup of oatmeal with a choice of raisins and brown sugar. After breakfast I attended my biotechnology class. Besides the beans I didn’t have to do much for lunch so I enjoyed a nice walk cross campus to attend my international economics class. The challenge ended at 2pm after that people could go back to their “homes” clean up and then meet up again at 4pm to eat our last meal and debrief. We had a little less than $100 left that was leftover from our budget of $2 per day. The choice was presented if the group wanted to add some chicken barbeque to the menu for the last meal, as a group we voted to donate the leftover money instead. I was quite grateful that many choose to donate instead of treating themselves to meat. For the last meal we literally cooked up all of our leftovers and had a feast while we discussed what we learned during our Challenge. Oh I can’t forget, before we began our discussion, Rufio made an entrance with two cakes for Jessica. It had been Jessica’s birthday on Sunday but she was so busy planning and working out the details for the $2 Challenge that she didn’t get to fully celebrate her birthday. While we all sang Happy Birthday to Jessica and thanked her for all she did I couldn’t help but think how real this Challenge felt. We had all grown so close in the past few days that it truly felt like a little community working through all of our struggles. The singing took me back to the days under sun in China, Dominican Republic, Haiti and Mexico where I had celebrated many birthdays with a homemade cake, rice and beans. Even though our living conditions were not exactly like a developing country with that I mean our “houses” on manicured grass and ocean view, we did come to a realization that living with such limited supplies is a struggle. In the few days that we did this Challenge many opened their eyes to think of new ideas on how to help our fellow brothers and sisters abroad. Some learned that cutting down on their resource usage was not as hard as they imagined. Some vowed to use the computer lab more often, cook a few meals that were cheap, not use their cell phones so much, and so on. For me, well, I came to appreciate my bed and the shower a little more. As much as I like to pamper myself with long showers I came to realize that not everyone could so I should try to conserve as much as I could. My bed, lets just say, it never felt so good!