A lunchtime sacrifice for tsunami victims

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 17, 2005

by Gracie Bonds Staples, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If this were any other lunch time, Morgane Pitte would cozy up to a bowl of pasta.

It is the 14-year-old's favorite thing to eat. But on Friday, rice it was. Rice and a drink from the school water fountain.

Tomorrow, she knows, will be different. Iif she chooses, Pitte will have three meals, and she will likely share them with friends and family. It will not be so for one-quarter of the world's children.

They will eat rice - and only if they're lucky.

It is a hard fact to fathom - but one the Atlanta International School was hoping to drive home in the wake of the tsunami disaster.

So on Friday, the only food available to Pitte and the school's 874 other students was rice. Money that would have been spent in preparing the school's normal fare will be donated to the tsunami relief effort.

David Hawley, the school headmaster, hopes the giving won't stop there. In addition to the money raised from student and faculty lunches, AIS also held silent auctions throughout the day, and students donated canned and packaged goods.

Soon, each student member of the school's advisory group will "adopt" a child in Thailand - providing clothing, school supplies and friendship until he or she graduates from school. That program was arranged through a relationship between the school and a village called Wang Pong near Bangkok.

All of it began, Hawley said, when students returned to school early this month and gathered for a moment of silence. They began to ponder what they might do to help tsunami victims.

Those who wanted to do more were invited to a meeting after school.

It was there that a teacher, Diane Dear, told them about the fifth grade world hunger unit, which includes a day where her students eat only rice. It's an exercise in keeping with AIS' mission - "to see the world from another's point of view."

As she ate her bowl of rice on Friday, Pitte tried to think about others and understand how they are coping in the big wave's aftermath.

"The rice was very good," said Pitte, who had never eaten a plain bowl of rice before. "But I don't think I could eat that every day."

And Pitte cried - again - when she recalled the first time she watched news of the disaster: footage of a little boy wandering around looking for his family, but unable to find any of his loved ones.

She decided then to do something. She took an empty Kleenex box, wrapped it in white paper, and wrote these words along the outside: tsunami relief.

That day she canvassed her Roswell neighborhood and collected $126 and three bags of clothing, school supplies and toiletries to add to the school's effort.

On Friday, Pitte was eager to join her schoolmates - some of whom opted to fast all day - in the effort.

"I'm still hungry," she said, "but I know that there will be something good to eat on my plate tomorrow."