Clark Lane Students Learn About Hunger, Hopelessness

After students in Jan Hybel’s geography class read A Long Walk to Water, a true story about the struggles families have getting water in southern Sudan, one boy had a question.

“He raised his hand and asked how could he help,” Hybel said, who teaches geography at Clark Lane Middle School. 

The boy’s query was not ignored. Hybel has designed a program based around that question, highlighted by bringing in William Wernau, a longtime volunteer at Heifer International. 

Wernau gave four presentations Friday, one to each of Hybel’s classes. There, he talked about the extreme poverty and hunger that exists in the third world and what the students can do to stop it.

“I want students to recognize that their actions here in America affect everyone in the world,” Wernau said. “And recognize how things are around the world.”

Wernau talked about how people work for almost nothing in sweatshops and plantations throughout the world, and how those products are sold to American consumers. He also showed pictures of what malnourished children look like and gave examples of the lives they lead.

Perhaps the most powerful part of the presentation was when he took a student volunteer and wrapped a flexible measuring stick around the student's upper arm to see if he was malnourished or not. While the student had a thin arm, it was still well within a healthy range.

Then he showed what a malnourished child’s arm would look like, which had about a one-inch circumference. The representation proved powerful, as the students gasped in horror.

Helping

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. Wernau also showed where Heifer International came in and helped – mostly, they buy goats and other animals for people in the third world – and showed the difference it makes.

He showed pictures of trips he took to areas where people were once starving, but got animals from Heifer that they raised and now are surviving. Wernau said that the gift of a goat or a cow is sustainable and the payoff exponential, as the animals have children that are passed to other people in the village, and the entire community is better off.

Hybel said she plans to have her students research what charities they themselves would like to be a part of. Then, she said she wants the students to build awareness campaigns for those charities, and raise money for them as well, she said.