Halloween against hunger

My friend is surprised that I knew nothing about it. He thought that it was invented in America, where people are all in for charity.

He works as a teacher in a school in Toronto, Canada.

His school has been doing it for several years already.

This year they are trying to exceed the plan and collect more than 76,000 pounds of long-lasting food during the Halloween time. For charity.

Children from his school will go around their neighborhood in various scary costumes, as it usually happens on Halloween, and will trick or treat the neighbors not just for candy, but also for some canned beans, or tuna, or something else from what they keep for a rainy day.

All of the gathered food is then will be sent to local food fund that helps the poor.

A new research, the results of which have been recently published by the United Nations Foundation and the Women’s Philanthropic Institute at the University of Indiana in the United States shows that children, at least in the North American territory, are more self-giving than the adults might be thinking. Nine out of ten children aged from 8 to 19 regularly give money to charity. Girls and boys are equally willing to help with money, girls are only slightly more willing than boys to do volunteer work.

One of the conclusions of the research is that when adults tell children more about the importance of charity it has a great impact on their willingness to help others, even greater than personal example.

That’s what my Canadian friend is doing.

He also teaches children to count the collected food well, later he will suggest equations for them to solve using this numbers. For some reason he thinks that children would love it.

The friend of mine also told me that the tradition of collecting food on Halloween became the second largest campaign of the kind after Christmas. People in at least three countries – Canada, USA, and Great Britain – do that.

Canadians explain the need for collecting food by the fact that in one out of five families in these countries adults often skip dinner so that children would get more food, and also many of them have to go to the grocery fund for help. Americans explain this by the fact that there are more than 40 million people below the poverty line and many of them have to go to the grocery funds for help. British people, I heard, just have a lot of canned beans…

All of this reminded me of my own childhood in Ukraine before its independence. No, we certainly knew nothing about either Halloween or collecting food back then – there were no hungry people in the Soviet Union, of course, and those, who could have come up with an idea for such charity campaign could pay dearly for it.

But we collected scrap – food for ever-hungry industry.

And it was cool.

Teachers gave us big tasks as to how much scrap we had to bring to the school yard in order to outdo the school next to ours. And we did our best. We were very inventive. It also helped that teachers did not need to know that those tin tubes that we dragged for scrap were not scrap, in fact, these were silencers from Lada cars, which could be well used by their owners.

I think that the Canadian, American, and British children will also put all their heart in the noble case and will spook their neighbors to hiccups for Halloween in order to get some cans of food and break the record.

I also think that parents will get involved in the noble case in the countries, where there is no hunger as such. They will be advised to skip dinner from time to time. In order to get rid of those unnecessary pounds of weight. As well as for charity.