Feeding the hungry one vocabulary word at a time
I was hitting Gerrit’s blog and came across an entry that talked about freerice.com. It is an ad-supported site with a bit of a twist. It gives you a vocabulary quiz and for each word you know the definition of the site donates 20 grains of rice towards the UN world food program. The site FAQ calculates that they have donated about 28 billion grains so far. I played the vocab game for about 10 minutes and learned a bunch of new words. The only downside was that when I decided to switch to something else, I got a bit of a guilty feeling that by quitting now some poor kid would stay hungry. Oh well, I think I earned someone a meal’s worth. Not sure how effective it is, but I like the concept.
Another cool semi-related item I heard about was the PlayPump. It mates a big strong metal wheel that kids can play on with a water pump. As the kids (or adults) turn the wheel, it helps pull up clean water from a well. This saves a lot of time in places where people otherwise would need to walk down to a river and carry water up by hand. Getting clean water reduces a lot of water-born diseases and also frees people up to do other things like attending school.