When Alta Crawford walked into the doors of Verde Valley School’s Brady Hall for the school’s 11th annual Hunger Banquet on Feb. 20, she was no longer a self-proclaimed snowbirder visiting the area via RV from Puget Sound, Wash., but Mele, a 36-year-old organic farmer from Kanokupolu, a village in Tonga, according to the Oxfam American Hunger Banquet card she received.
While Alta had been sorted into the “middle income” group, her husband Dennis was sorted into the lower income one as 28-year-old Korsaga, who escaped from a violent Ivory Coast during its civil war. According to Dennis’ card, Korsaga and the other refugees “lack food and cooking supplies for preparing food.”
In order to stay together during the event, Alta took to the floor with her husband in the designated “impoverished” area. Here, children, adults and elders of all colors and creed were served rice, beans and tortillas to mimic the 50% of the world’s population who truly make up that class.
“I got to say, my bum is really sore,” Alta laughed about her and Dennis’ seating arrangements for the evening. “But you know I feel very grateful; we have a wall that we can lean against. You start thinking about, what do I got that we can be thankful for?”
Had Alta stayed in the middle class group that represents 30% of the world’s population, she would have had the luxury of a chair. Her meal would have stayed the same with the addition of greens, which she would eat off a compostable bamboo plate.
From the floor, Dennis and Alta were able to look up and see the “upper class” at their decorated tables, chowing down on Caesar salad with either Filet Mignon, a shrimp cocktail platter and garlic parmesan toast or a vegetarian option of herbed polenta, Duchess potatoes and lemon asparagus. This group made up 20% of the attendees, mimicking the same percentage of those who are upper class in the world.
Michelle Montgomery, a junior at VVS who was sorted into the upper class and had sparkling cider and chocolate truffle cake served to her by her fellow classmates, said it was a big change from last year’s Hunger Banquet, when she was sorted into the lower class.
“It’s kind of weird, just seeing one of my best friend’s in the poor class when I’m eating the good food,” she said. “It’s pretty nice to sit here, but it’s an odd experience. … It just seems very different and you wouldn’t think that these are the type of statistics that go into this.”
These statistics were displayed on stage from a projector and narrated by students before the dinner began, along with VVS theater student vignettes that displayed stories of those struggling with hunger worldwide.
“Hunger affects everyone, in countries rich and poor. But some of us face greater challenges than others,” Alex Gilbert dictated to the packed hall. “While the U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, 39.7 million Americans live in poverty. One in six American children is hungry. That’s more than 15%. In Yavapai County, it is one in three children living below the poverty line.”
Elijah Stone demonstrated the struggle of one such area youth in the monologue that he researched for and wrote for his theater class.
“I live in Cottonwood. My parents both work two jobs, all the way in Cornville, so they’re pretty much not home,” Stone recited by heart. “When they think I can’t hear them, they complain about not getting enough hours. As soon as I was old enough to understand what that meant, it would hurt every time. Hurt, so much, because all I’ve ever wanted, aside from food, was not to be alone. To feel like the house wasn’t as empty as my stomach.”
Later, Stone told a different part of the character’s story:
“I’ve just started high school. My parents always tell me that the most important thing, if I want a better future, is to do well in school, but I sit in those classrooms listening to the teacher talk about algebra, or King Louis XIV, and all I can feel is a deep burning pit in my stomach and fogginess in my head.”
VVS junior Natalie Carter played a woman from India who was not able to receive the education she needed to further her status and get a job that payed enough so that she could properly eat. Instead, her character was forced into an arranged marriage with a man she despised in order to provide for herself. Although Carter said she has been acting since she was very young, she said acting in her first Hunger Banquet vignette was daunting.
“It’s hard because you really feel like you need to do justice to the person that really went through [it],” she said. “Because there’s hundreds of girls who are in the same situation that I was acting every single day, and so I really felt like I needed to be respectful and really accurate about it, and so that was kind of stressful just knowing that I had that to uphold.”
This performance struck a chord with Alta.
“The young woman who was talking about not being able to get an education — I come from a poor family, maybe not to the extent that some of these people do — but the fact that I was able to go to college and get a degree is an absolute blessing to me and I really feel for young women who have no chance, no choice, no future,” she said.
Alta’s reaction is what VVS theater teacher Bridget Broomfield and her class were hoping for: Instilling empathy from the audience in order to spark them to make real change. For the VVS students that perform and participate in the Hunger Banquet every year, Head of School Paul Amadio has a similar vision.
“What our hope is is that we bring awareness, of course, and that we support the community,” he said. “But more importantly, we want this to sit in [the students’] hearts as students of the world and global citizens so they are aware, they are educated, but then they can go back [to their countries] and make a difference.”
Amadio, who has attended the six Hunger Banquets since he took over as VVS’ head, said the main difference he has seen at the event through the years is the amount of community involvement.
“It’s changed only in the sense that we have a lot more community support now,” he said. “A lot of people from Sedona buy their tickets online and they come here specifically because they support the real tragedy in this county, which is that one in three students under 12 are food insecure in this county. And that’s just unbelievable to me.”
Along with supporting the county, admission to the event, raffle tickets and donations go to help educate girls in Malawi. The donation money will be distributed to the developing east-African country during an upcoming VVS trip.
Amadio said he gets sorted into the different classes for the meals just like everyone else who participates in the banquet.
“One year I got the steak and I gave that to someone else,” he laughed.
