freerice.com

Ever thought that you spend more and more time on the internet day by day, ever realized that as other forms of human indulgence in the world, access to the world wide web has become "addictive"? I sure do. Since morning till the minute i write this article, my internet experienced a system failure, meaning that i couldnt hook up to the web for the first 8 hours of today. About 1 year ago this would have been fine, and I wouldnt even bother talking about it like it was something big. But today i felt my addiction to this luxury. To be completely honest remembering last week's hectic weekend (read "the things i do..." and "fiasco at the airport") i decided that i should have a simpler week, a sort of "quitter" week. So this weekend would've my couch potato day (a day where i sit in front of the monitor and surf all day long ahhaha). This obviously failed, and i was pretty grumpy.

I'm pretty sure you people who actually do have time to log on to the net and actually read blogs, then open mine, you do have excess time on the net (implying not that you're wasting my time, keep reading my blog haha but just saying you probably spend quite some time on the virtual network). You probably share my griefs today.

This friend of mine, in the Red Cross, introduced me to an interesting website, in which now i pass on to you, lucky readers you ;) The website's called freerice.com (also works if you type in freerice.org). Now this is not your everyday facebook or myspace, it's actually something different in philosophy. This website is maintained by the United Nations World Food Programme (UN-WFP), and it's only a baby; 2 years old. The UN-WFP wanted to kick start an internet campaign to fight world hunger; a problem that may be for us seems a little far fetched, but believe me in the depth of countries like Malawi, and a large portion of Africa, is an actual imminent threat of death. Famine is a problem, and this website has worked sort of like a panacea (Greek mythology's God of healing).

It's displayed in nice greenish themed layout with the background of grain rice "plants" (i'm sorry i've no clue what to call them haha). This website is nice since it attracts people to donate, and what better way to capitalize on basic human nature; where you can give to others without actually compromising something from your own pockets (look i know this is a rude way of saying it, but you can't deny it's true in most cases). So what must we do in the name of nobility in this site? We must play! So you can keep doing this for 24/7 straight depending how noble, unemployed, or sad you are, as the website gives you a word in which you choose the correct synonim of it (closest meaning to -red). You can also change this with other subject questions apparently, your choice. For every answer you get right, you donate 10 grains of rice to UN-WFP's program. You might say "pffft, some contribution.. 10 grains??". Let me play with your statistics; there's around 10-20% of world population that are accessible thru the net, that makes it roughly 500 million people, if every person every day plays once, and gets just one question right every time, you'd have 5 billion grains of rice per day, in a month you'd have 150 billion grains of rice, and in a year you'd have (let me put in the zeros to show you the figure) 1.800.000.000.000 grains of rice (1,800 billion). You can figure out how much that is in metric tonnes, but it does sound a lot don't you think? Helping another human eating a plate of rice every day is already noble, but imagine feeding a whole country? Below you can see statistics of this program so far from year to year, compared to the amount of grains donated.
So how does a single click translate to 10 grains of rice, you ask me? Well, this website uses the "google adsense" system just to give you an illustration in a nutshell. Donators, sponsors, good samaritans, philantrophies helps this program obviously, but for corporate interest, it's like an ad-click system on a blog, for every click the blog owner gets an incentive from the advertisee, in return they see their corporate logo on the web. The economical scheme makes sense.

"a simple click of a mouse is the difference whether that poor girl in africa eats or not tommorow.."

The beauty of this programs is that it takes advantage of so many elements to make it work, they get to buy the rice from sponsors, who get advertising benefits on the page, and we get to donate, and have fun at the same time.. Ingenious!

So, ever thought that donating is hard? Ever thought that you'd have to compromise a lot to help others? What if you can do it all for free, while you're waiting for that movie to download? All it takes is one click, and this website up to 2008 have gathered 1 billion grains, enough to feed 50,000 people per day for a year. Is one click really too much of a price to pay? I don't get paid to write this, i just think that its ridiculous that no as many people that can join and help is doing so, and my only merit is that; now you know.. click!!