By Jonathan Hiser
Zahra Hamid Sultan rushed into the nearest Baghdad hospital, clutching an unconscious baby in her arms. The nurses and doctors stopped her, asking a flurry of questions, but Sultan didn't want to answer them.
"Please help her," Sultan said, crying. "I'm only her neighbor; I just don't want to see her die."
The medical team tried to resuscitate the malnourished 6-month-old infant, but it was too late; she died there in the hospital. She was not alone; four million more Iraqis, half of them children, would die as a result of U.N. sanctions on Iraq.
The year was 1990, and so began Sultan's struggle against 13 years of U.N. economic sanctions. An Iraqi refugee and social worker from Baghdad, Sultan told her story at the Oxfam Hunger Banquet in St. Mary's Student Center on Tuesday night.
"It helps to put things in perspective," senior Dane Conroy said, "It was powerful to hear her story. It really struck a chord."
Held by the Social Work Club, the banquet was an opportunity for students to get a taste of the global economic conditions that contribute to global hunger.
"Hunger isn't about food, it's about power, or the misuse of it," the Rev. Jim Lies, C.S.C., a social science professor, said. "Human rights are not contingent on our nation of origin, they are universal and nonnegotiable."
On-campus students replaced their meal at The Commons with the banquet meal, donating $7 to hunger charities in the process.
In exchange, 60 percent of the attending students were given only rice to eat and pitchers of water to share amongst themselves. The rest of the students were given seats to sit in and progressively better meals.
As Lies said, the banquet was a metaphor for how food and other resources are inequitably distributed. Quality and balance didn't exist at the banquet.
"I think it's realistic because it shows what the world is like," sophomore Bradford Williamson said.
Bread for the World organizer Matt Newell-Ching urged students to support rural populations, citing that 75 percent of the poorest people in the world live in farming areas.
Newell-Ching attributed unfair world crop prices to the over-subsiding of U.S. and European farmers, which drive down local food prices. He said countries like Mali lose more money because of U.S. farming practices than they receive from U.S. aid.
Quoting a Malian farmer, Newell-Ching said, "When you export a subsidized product, you export poverty."
Newell-Ching encouraged students to contact government officials to support amendments to a farm bill currently up for vote in the Senate.
"Call your senators in the next 24 hours because they may be voting on it that soon," Newell-Ching said. "This will help people from the Midwest to West Africa."
Junior Britney Schneider said she didn't know about the farm bill amendments until that night, but said she planned to call her senators the next day.
Sultan said she was hopeful that the youth can make a difference, but added that there is much that needs to be changed.
"In Iraq, it's thousands of times worse than before," Sultan said. "You don't have the time to feel hungry when people are being killed."
Lies ended the banquet reiterating the calls for student action.
"We need to become active to change society," Lies said. "We need to change policies that make a world of hunger in a world of plenty."
The Hunger Banquet kicked off UP's Hunger Awareness Week, which featured a panel discussion on Wednesday and a hunger fast that continues today.
