Friday , March 29 2024
This Halloween please take a silent guest with you trick or treating, and feed one of the world's hungry children.

On Halloween Remember the World’s Hungry

It’s Halloween 2011 and time for the Wolfman, Dracula, and other monsters and ghosts to have their one night of the year. And let’s not forget Egypt’s famous Halloween contribution, the Mummy, and a couple of creatures that have appeared in this column when they helped with fundraisers, the Mothman and the Yeti.

Halloween means lots of candy too! In fact billions of dollars are spent on Halloween festivities. But this year please take a silent guest with you when trick or treating, or at your Halloween party. You can help one of the world’s nearly one billion hungry who on Halloween, or any other day, will hope to get maybe one meal if they are lucky.

There are many ways that Halloween can be combined with fighting hunger. In fact, in 1947 students used Halloween not to collect treats but to collect canned goods for the Friendship Train that fed the hungry in war-torn Europe.

On Halloween night, maybe in place of one of the treats, you could ask for a dollar to buy a week’s worth of meals for a hungry child. You can send the dollar to food aid agencies like the World Food Programme, Save the Children, Feeding America, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services and others.

Or perhaps take a few minutes after coming home from trick or treating to play a few rounds of the online game Free Rice. For every correct answer you get, rice is donated to the hungry in developing countries.

There are many ways you can combine Halloween and fighting hunger. For this night is one of imagination. So the best ideas are to come: from you.

About William Lambers

William Lambers is the author of several books including Ending World Hunger: School Lunches for Kids Around the World. This book features over 50 interviews with officials from the UN World Food Programme and other charities discussing school feeding programs that fight child hunger. He is also the author of Nuclear Weapons, The Road to Peace: From the Disarming of the Great Lakes to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Open Skies for Peace, The Spirit of the Marshall Plan: Taking Action Against World Hunger, School Lunches for Kids Around the World, The Roadmap to End Global Hunger, From War to Peace and the Battle of Britain. He is also a writer for the History News Service. His articles have been published by newspapers including the Cincinnati Enquirer, Des Moines Register, the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Buffalo News, San Diego Union Tribune, the Providence Journal, Free Lance-Star (VA), the Bakersfield Californian, the Washington Post, Miami Herald (FL), Chicago Sun-Times, the Patriot Ledger (MA), Charleston Sunday Gazette Mail (WV), the Cincinnati Post, Salt Lake Tribune (UT), North Adams Transcript (MA), Wichita Eagle (KS), Monterey Herald (CA), Athens Banner-Herald (GA) and the Duluth News Journal. His articles also appear on History News Network (HNN) and Think Africa Press. Mr. Lambers is a graduate of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Ohio with degrees in Liberal Arts (BA) and Organizational Leadership (MS). He is also a member of the Feeding America Blogger Council.

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