Poverty lesson hits the heart, stomach of Monroe Catholic students

from the Fairbanks Daily News Miner

In front of a graffiti-covered wall, poverty-stricken girls savagely devour a plate of pasta. Instead of the ghettos of a third-world country, the girls are guests at a hunger banquet at Monroe Catholic High School.

The hunger banquet was a community service project presented by Kristen Kelly’s junior Christian Ethics class as part of its social justice unit.

“It was a great idea to raise awareness of the local poverty,” Kelly said.

Sixty percent of the night’s donations are going to the local soup kitchen and the remaining 40 percent will be given to Oxfam America, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty and social injustice.

When nearly 80 guests entered the banquet, they were randomly assigned a ticket which told them which economic group they would be a part of. Fifteen percent of the tickets were upper-class, 35 percent were middle class and 50 percent represented poverty. The percentages came from Oxfam America, which estimates one billion people in the world are living in poverty.

The upper-class guests were treated to their choice of soup or salad and two different pastas for the main course, which was served with silverware at tables covered with linens and candles.

The middle class table had a family-style meal of tortillas, beans and rice and was served on bare tables. The impoverished had to line up to receive a cup of rice and a cup of water, which they had to eat on the floor.

“Right now, I feel like a jerk,” upper class diner, Selah Boyle said.

Monroe Principal Vincent Fantazzi started the banquet in poverty, but through a role-playing exercise, his character found work in a factory and was moved to the middle class section. After the exercise, middle-class diner Joan Stepovich said the whole evening was eye-opening.

“It can happen to anyone, it’s borderline close,” she said.

Student Breanna Anderson brought the idea to Kelly’s class after presenting a hunger banquet with her youth group in Cordova.

“I think it’s a good idea that promotes a lot of awareness,” Anderson said.

Although the evening started with guards keeping the poor away from the wealthy, as the night wore on, the diners mixed. The upper-class diners shared leftovers with the impoverished-class diners sitting behind them. Grace Minder, an upper-class diner who gave away her soup, said she felt compelled because the poverty class simply didn’t have enough.

Minder came to the hunger banquet to support her nephew, who is in the junior class, but she left with more awareness of the problems and numbers associated with global poverty.