You can read about the other days of my Ration Challenge here
Waking up on the morning of day 3 of my Ration Challenge was completely unlike the other two mornings. No headache, no hunger…I had no idea what was going on!
Maybe it genuinely was that I wasn’t hungry. Maybe I just couldn’t stomach the thought of yet more rice. Who knows…
Either way, I got cracking with my first pint of water, and had a cup of black tea (my second reuse of the same teabag) at about 8.30am, to keep me going.
I knew, as before, that preparing the small person’s meals and watching him eat would be my biggest challenge, so I had a dry reheated flatbread at around 11.45am, along with another black tea, while he was napping. And that got me thinking…there simply aren’t enough complete ration packs to feed every single one of the 80,000-odd people in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp each week, so what do families do? Do the parents go without to keep their children fed? A sobering thought.
That flatbread and tea staved off any hunger pangs while he ate, and I managed to get to 3pm before eating flatbread number 2.
My whole Ration Challenge days seem to revolve around mealtimes now. 6pm came, along with the temptation of the cheese on toast I’d made Oscar for his dinner…I’m not going to deny that I spent a while sniffing it while it was cooling enough for him to eat. Me? I had another black tea. That teabag is now getting very weak indeed…
7.15pm, and I figured I should probably eat something other than flatbreads. So I mustered up the motivation to fry some of the onion rice I’d made the previous night, with oil and a lot of paprika, along with a few kidney beans. I’m not used to using oil in cooking anymore (I normally use the spray stuff), so the whole thing tasted pretty greasy…but I figured I needed the calories. And yes, I had another flatbread on the side, too – my third of the day.
Every other evening I’ve prepped at least something for the next day – today I just didn’t have the energy (or the inclination to look at yet more rice). So I didn’t – and after a day of very little food, 3 cups of weak black tea and 4 pints of water, I called it a night.
It may not have been as challenging a day in terms of headaches etc as those that came before, but the boredom is fast setting in. Cooking and eating are two of my great pleasures in life…and there’s only so much enjoyment you can get (pretty much none) cooking such meagre supplies. It does make me wonder, though, if I’m generally hungry when I think I’m hungry, or whether it’s just that there’s something tempting calling my name – I’ve not been as hungry as I expected at all this week.
Almost halfway through, and Concern Worldwide have announced that this year’s UK Ration Challenge has so far raised just over £600,000 – a sum which is enough to provide a year’s worth of food for 3,896 refugees living in camps in Jordan. I may not be enjoying my week, but that’s the point – and I’m lucky to be doing it for seven days, not for several years.
Dig deep and sponsor if you can!