My wife and I are youth leaders and this past Friday (April 20th, 2012) we led our students in World Vision's 30 Hour Famine. Wow, what an experience. Over the course of the 30 hours we learned about the countries of Kenya, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Bolivia. The students played games that taught them how hard life can be when you are hungry or have to walk miles one way to get water. They learned about how malaria is killing thousands of children when a simple bed net can help solve the problem. Of course the entire time I was interested in seeing what being hungry for that long would do to the inner zombie...
Actually, it took longer than I thought for the first zombie to really emerge. At about 10pm the littlest among us, my daughter Winter, lost it. Earlier in the day they had made shelters out of found materials such as cardboard, twine, scraps of tarps, etc. She was very proud of her tribe's shelter and it was damaged during the late night game. For a while she just cried in the corner and then, all of a sudden, with no warning at all she went nuts on the kids playing the game. Now she was only 9 (she had been receiving meal replacement shakes because of her age) and here kids twice her age suddenly found themselves on the wrong end of her fury! Winter is normally a very happy go lucky girl and not too much bothers her so these kids had never seen her in a rage and had no idea what to do. Fortunately for the other students her mother, my wife, was there to pull her back and send her downstairs. Unfortunately for her my zombie had heard the howl of hers and had managed to catch me off guard and take control.
To say that the confrontation between our two zombies was brief is certainly true but it was hideously ugly none the less. She hadn't even made it down the stairs and I whisked her away to one of the classrooms in the church, read her the riot act for her behavior and shut the door and made her wait 5 minutes in solitary confinement. Of course once the shock of being closed in a room by herself wore off she started a temper tantrum in the room with much banging on the table therein. This action by her zombie infuriated mine and so in I went with my zombie on full howl. She quickly discovered that perhaps it hadn't been the best move to have let loose as she had and her zombie retreated leaving her to deal with mine.
The whole thing was over in less than 10 minutes but as I regained control I could see that it had had a profound affect on those who witnessed it. Most of them had never seen either of us go off the deep end like that and you could see in their eyes that they never wanted to witness it again. The rest of the evening was fairly quiet and despite many of them talking big about staying up all night it wasn't long until everyone fell asleep. This had all happened just 11 hours into the Famine.
The next day you could see the other zombies stirring as the day wore on. Chips began to form on shoulders, snide remarks became the standard, and some people who had been fairly jovial were beginning to get annoyed at every little thing. By the time clean up time came many zombies had all but taken over their hosts and you could see it in the hosts eyes. Then came the time to break the fast. All the kids thought we were going to lay out a spread right then and there but we didn't. We broke the fast with CSB. peanut butter balls. CSB stands for Corn Soy Blend and is what is given to people suffering from extreme and/or extended malnutrition. It is very nutritious but has a weird taste and texture and is bland in the extreme. In the state these kids were in it was easy for their zombies to take over and the complaints started to fly! I think many of them remembered the night before so no one got crazy but they were NOT happy that we had not given them "real" food and weren't shy about letting us know what they thought of the CSB and our serving it to them. They didn't care one bit that this was what was served to starving people and that we had wanted them to have just a taste (literally) of what these folks had to deal with when they had been starving for an extended period of time. The peanut butter balls, which are also a food given to folks who have gone hungry for an extended period, helped soothe the savage beasts. Of course there were a few students who were just thrilled to have something, anything to eat and enjoyed several helpings of the CSB. I thisnk they got the point of the exercise.
In looking back I suppose I should have anticipated that being that hungry could set the stage for a full on zombie take over but I hadn't and while I find it interesting to see that in groups zombies seem to establish a sort of hierarchy I would have been much more satisfied with the whole event if mine hadn't been one of the zombies let loose. Next year I will be better prepared...I hope.
So what did I learn? That you must be ever vigilant in the fight against the Zombie inside. Doubly or triply so when you are in stressful circumstances because when your body is in survival mode that's when you are most vulnerable to a zombie attack. When you are weakened physically, mentally, spiritually or any combination of the three you should increase your zombie threat level to red because an attack is imminent.
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