Free Rice

Free Rice came to me on one of my daily emails, Dumb Little Man, as part of a list of 50 things that I could do today to make my life healthier. A lot of them were kind of unique and some of them were stretching it a bit, but hey, 50 things to come up with all at once would be kind of hard, I would think. Actually, I know, because I’ve been working on a list about the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and it’s pretty darn hard.

But back to the Free Rice. They donate 10 grains of rice for each question that you answer correctly. What started as a small click in an email for me has turned into a compulsion! My son and I have been playing off and on all day. I have focused on English vocabulary (go figure) and he has been sampling different subjects, such as Spanish, math, and Chemical symbols.
 
Throughout the day today, I have donated over 4000 grains of rice and he has donated over 2000 grains of rice. Now, math is not my strong point, but it says on Free Rice that a day’s ration of rice is 400 grams and there are 48 grains of rice in a gram. That’s 19,200 grains of rice. So a person has to answer 1,920 questions to get a daily ration of rice. That seems like a lot. A whole lot, so I was sitting here wondering why I was answering these questions. I’d never get a whole day’s ration to be donated, so what was the use, right?
 
Well, think about it. Today alone, just my son and I have donated nearly a third of a day’s ration of rice for someone who desperately wants it. I mean they want it really bad, because they don’t want to be the one in six people that die today because they didn’t get enough food. And when you think about, one in six isn’t that much because I could name six people that I know right now. How about you? Can you name six people? Could you imagine one of those six people starving too death?
 
So, what it boils down to is that when we all play the game it makes the grains of rice add up. If only twenty people play for about an hour a day, we can save the one of the six. Or if you donate 3,000 grains every day, you could say that every seventh day, you save that person. Either way, the difference is in the numbers…. Do you want to be one of them?