70 Day Rice Challenge

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On Sunday May 23rd, I will be embarking on a 70 Day Rice Challenge, only eating Rice, drinking water & juice, and taking Multi Vitamins. Once a week I will be including either an egg, or half a tin of beans for nutrients. For 70 Days i am setting aside the privledges of Western food to live like the poor, to know and experience real hunger like they do. The Challenge will go until Monday August 2nd where I will embark then onto another challenge called the $1.25 Campaign Challenge - where i'll live on $1.25 each day for 5 days.

Over 1.4 Billion people today live on less then $1.25US a day. At least 1.4 Billion people only eat rice each day for their meal, let alone once or twice a week.

I recently went on a Roadtrip with Make Poverty History with 1000 other young Ambassadors between the ages of 16-25, we travelled from all around Australia to a summit in Canberra where on the way we went around our states getting local Australians to sign a petition called The Act To End Poverty - if we recieved 40,000 signatures from local Australians who thought it important that we end extreme poverty in our lifetime, then a motion would be raised in Parliment, and The Act to End Poverty would be put back on the Goverments agenda, to make change & to increase to our percentage of AID from our GNI - so we as a group of young people, 2 people from each electorate were privledged to meet with our local MP's where we got to speak with them on the issues of Global Extreme Poverty & the importance of ending it in our lifetime - our Goal is 0.7% of every $100 of our GNI to go towards getting more AID, better AID and making it more effective, before the 12th it was at around 0.3%, and this past week on 13th May the Goverment agreed to 0.5% - which is good, but not good enough - we're still believing for 0.7% by 2015!

The 70 Day Rice Challenge has been inspired by a girl i went on the roadtrip with, and she actually begun her challenge on Tuesday 18th May to do 75 Days of only eating rice. We're looking for others to join for the full 70 Days, or to come alongside later on in the adventure for either 50 days, or 30 days - basically we think it's unfair that whilst we feast on Pizza, or on all the luxuries of having food available to us, there are people, and children starving to death every day & night, simply because they are denied the basic needs.

This Blog will be a reflection of the days to come, the challenges, hardships, triumphs, fails, the success & possibly some media coverage. :) Also working on establishing a sponsorship page where you can donate money to our cause to help fight global poverty. Will let you know when we figure that part out.

For now, peace & blessings. x