Tuesday, January 12

WWFF



Will Work for Food (WWFF) is a humanitarian relief organization to fight hunger, specifically in the Darfur region. Being a representative of WWFF for my school, I decided that it would be cool to do a blogpost about it. Maybe whoever reads this will get motivated to help this cause!

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are currently 20 million young children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) is a huge epidemic that people confuse with hunger. Malnutrition is the lack of essential nutrients that the body needs to survive. While, on the other hand, hunger is the lack of calories. SAM is often known as the "Silent Killer" because it is not receiving the attention it deserves.

"1 in 7 kids in Darfur are severely malnourished. This means that without our help, 15% of the children in Darfur will either starve to death or suffer from weakened physical and mental development."

To help fight malnutrition, is a bar known as Plumpy'Nut. WWFF's website states that "In the past, milk-based nutritional supplements had only a 25-40% recovery rate. When recently used in Niger, children given Plumpy'nut® had between a 81% to
95% recovery rate," which is amazing.
Plumpy'Nut is a 500 kcal mixture which includes peanut butter, vitamins, minerals, powdered milk, sugar, and vegetable oil. It is sweet-tasting, and can reverse malnutrition in half the time it takes for the products used before.
A 3-weeks supply of this bar would be enough to save one child's life. To learn more about Plumpy'Nut, click here.

What can you do?

Go to the website, which I linked to above, and sign up! See if there are any groups in your area, and if not, make one!
What you would need to do is to get sponsers for you (i.e. parents, other family members, businesses?) and ask them to donate around, say, 5 dollars for every 1 hour you volunteer. It is as simple as that!
For example, the WWFF at my school is having a scarf drive -- we're asking around local businesses to support us and donate money for every scarf we knit/or the hours we spent on making it.

They also have a blog, so you can check that out as well.

(all the quotes are from the WWFF website)

3 comments:

sugar & spice said...

how long do i have to finish the scarf?

vani said...

umm january 29th!

sugar & spice said...

tanks beautiful, i'll have a puuurple scarf 4 u by the 29th :)