Sitting in the middle of the beautiful, grassy commons at the University of Mary Washington is a pile of cardboard, duct tape, twine and dangling blue tarp. This makeshift contraption shelters several of the nearly thirty students choosing to live on less than two dollars per day during Challenge Week. The participants, who cannot afford water and must boil everything they drink, are parched and sweating under the hottest sun ever to shine on the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Coincidentally, Challenge Week was scheduled at the same time the university was serving up free barbeque for its students. While the participants have done well to refrain from eating the free food, passersby nonetheless have offered to donate their barbeque. Food donations have posed an odd dilemma for the participants, who want to uphold the spirit of working in exchange for food or money while respecting the generosity of observers. They decided to accept the food, encouraging donors to keep on giving to the world. They will donate the surplus to a local food bank.
As the week progresses, participants have had a chance to reflect on the purpose of their financial abstinence. Ehren Guzman is a junior at the University of Mary Washington and a first-time participant of Challenge Week. Every summer he buys a plane ticket to visit his family in Honduras. Driving through the streets in Central America, he would catch glimpses of urban slums and people standing outside of mud-and-stick houses with scrap-metal roofs. Guzman said he took the Challenge to understand more completely what life was like for those people living in extreme poverty.
Half the people in the world live on less than two dollars every day. The hope of Challenge Week is to reveal to people what kind of toll that takes on the mind, body and spirit of a person. Three days into the Challenge, Guzman claims he has yet to have his moral epiphany. But he has drawn insight from some of the minor new obstacles in his life, particularly from his lack of access to water. ”After working all day, all you get to come back to is this,” he said, holding up a small tupperware bowl with some pre-boiled water. Prohibiting the use of tap water, private showers, and electricity during the night are just a few of the rules designed to help Challenge Week participants understand life for half of the world.
Challenge Week is halfway finished for students at the University of Mary Washington. Tomorrow night they will begin a series of roundtable discussions to share their experiences. They will continue to live on less than two dollars per day, though many have already spent their entire allowance of money for the week. For them these final nights will pose the greatest challenge. In the meantime they will continue to raising money to support two impoverished women entrepreneurs in Kenya through OptINnow by Opportunity International.
