Hunger

As a child I can clearly remember experiencing hunger, it was very stressful for me to see my mother going to work to provide for us and still couldn't make ends meet.  I remember coming home from school with no food to eat and my mother being stressed out because she couldn't provide for us.  I was born and raised in Belize City where poverty is big and it is a must to have a good paying job to make a living so hunger was one of our biggest stressor at home.

Food for thought: How hunger affects your education

By Callie Stevens| April 7, 2016

Brought to you by: World Vision

Photo: Joe Were, Graphic: Alana Espineli

Have you ever sat through a class that’s right before lunch, staring at the second hand on the clock, imagining you're crunching on chips? Watching that clock becomes far more important than French or algebra.

For too many kids in the world, their first meal of the day is dinner. Lunchtime doesn’t mean relief from chronic hunger, and that hunger drastically impacts the way children learn.

It turns out hunger doesn’t just affect how we learn or pay attention in school – it also affects how well our brain works or develops. A healthy brain uses 20% of the body’s energy, and energy comes from food. That means that hunger starves the brain.

This article is interesting because in shows how hunger affected me when I was a child, so I always make sure my students receive a meal when in my care.  This shows how much children are still being affected by hunger in places all over the map.The present study utilised the approach employed by the World Bank, which imputes for non-food elements by taking the average spent by the poorest 40 percent of the population on these items. The sum of the values of the minimum food requirements and the non-food elements constitute the poverty line. The study also relied on expenditure data rather than on income in identifying the level of well-being in a household and among individuals.

The data for the assessment of poverty were derived from a national survey conducted by the Central Statistical Office (CSO) of Belize in mid-1995. The survey design was patterned after the Labour Force Survey that the CSO has been conducting on a biannual basis, since the early 1990s.