Campus Y Banquet Demonstrates Disparities

Campus Y's third annual Hunger Banquet, held in the Carmichael Ballroom, featured a role-playing game in which students acted out stories like Pancho's.

Students were given yellow, pink or blue slips of paper that corresponded to the actual percentage of homeless people across the globe and their earnings.

The slips of paper contained personal information about an individual in a given socioeconomic class and what his life is like. The event is a part of Campus Y's Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week.

Intrigued students acting out these roles listened intently to startling statistics -- every 3.6 seconds, someone dies from hunger, and one-fifth of the world's population is in poverty.

The upper class -- about 15 percent of the participants -- receive $9,200 per year or more and were represented by students with yellow slips of paper.

Those with pink slips of paper symbolized people who are paid between $750 and $9,200 per year. About 30 percent of the world's population falls into this category.

Fifty-five percent, a majority of the students who came to the Hunger Banquet, represented the lower class, or those who are paid less than $750 per year.

The dinner each person received was based on his class in society. The upper-class students ate food from nearby restaurants such as Spanky's, Ham's and the Carolina Coffee Shop. They also got the privilege of sitting at a table adorned with silverware and flowers.

About 30 percent of the students represented the middle class. They sat in a circle of chairs and ate rice and beans served on plastic foam plates. They, along with the upper class, had tea to drink.

The lower-class students dominated the overall number of participants by representing 55 percent of the world's population. They sat huddled on the floor, ate rice spooned out onto cardboard plates and drank water.

Other activities for the week include dinner discussions Wednesday and Thursday that will focus on health issues, as well as why some homeless people would rather be in prison than live on the streets.

The week will end with a Street Speak "Speak Out" in the Pit from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., where members of the homeless community will tell true stories about life on the streets.

Campus Y is modeling the Hunger Banquet after Oxfam America, an international organization that has been organizing events like this since 1970.

Freshman Terence McNamara said he attended the Hunger Banquet because he was curious about what the Campus Y had to say. "(The demonstration) was a pretty good symbolic representation of how horribly some people have to live," he said.

Tiffanie White, a sophomore English major, said, "I'll definitely think twice before throwing food away now."

Grayson Barnes, co-chairwoman of the Campus Y hunger and homelessness outreach project, said she hopes the event will promote discussion among students.

"An incredibly small group of activists are working for this cause, whereas if more people know about it, it could bring about global change."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.