I’m a bit behind with my daily updates…mainly because I’m absolutely shattered. But on the plus side, I saved some of the contents of my Ration Challenge pack until the latter part of the week, to give me a bit more flavour and variety to look forward to…
So…Thursday. Woke up with a headache once again, which I’m sure is down to the lack of nutrients (or it could just be the lingering caffeine and sugar withdrawal symptoms, I guess!) At 8am I broke out the second of my two teabags for a cup of (slightly stronger than yesterday) black tea.
I’d already soaked my 85g of dried chickpeas overnight, so I drained and rinsed them, and put them on to boil. Normally, I only buy the tinned variety, which are SO much easier to work with…we really have got things pretty easy here when it comes to food prep. I had no idea what I was planning on doing with these, but figured that it would be easier to decide once they were cooked and ready to use.
It almost turned into a disaster, though: preoccupied with the small person, I was lucky to hear the sizzling noise coming from the kitchen – the water in the pan had completely evaporated! Luckily, I was just in time to salvage them before I burnt the lot…
On Thursday nights, I run my Slimming World group, so I knew I’d need a boost of energy later in the day. And that’s why I didn’t sit down for my first meal of the day until 3.45pm: I figured it would then keep me going till I finished at 8.30. And it was…ok, I guess. I finished off the dal I’d previously made (lentils, salt, paprika), along with a spoonful of mashed sardines and a scattering of kidney beans which, by now, are starting to taste a little past their best. But apparently, my meal looked so good that someone decided he wanted to try and get in on the action…
5.15pm was the highlight of my day! I hit my next fundraising target – £400 in sponsorship – which qualified me for my next “reward”. With this Ration Challenge, you earn certain rewards for hitting set sponsorship levels: a tactic designed not only to raise more money, but to mimic the fact that, in Jordan’s refugee camps, some refugees are able to earn a little money through working. And that £400 meant I could treat myself to 120g of the protein of my choice, which I knew would be invaluable for the last two days. I’d need to think very carefully about what to choose…
My evening was spent running my Slimming World group – and it was a big night, with one of my members hitting her target weight after losing four stone in just seven months – lots of celebration! All the talk about food, though, had made me hungry – so when I got home I whipped up a batch of hummus with half my cooked chickpeas, some oil and paprika, plus salt. And in my sleepy, brain-fogged state, I completely overdid the salt to the point where it was almost inedible, but there’s no way I could afford to throw valuable food away.
I ate the hummus along with another spoonful of mashed tinned sardines and the remaining few kidney beans and, running low on flour, I cooked a couple of crepes. These were literally just flour, salt and water, fried in a dry pan, but they tasted absolutely amazing! The fact that I had my meal on a side plate shows just how much my appetite has shrunk over the last five days…
Those two meals, plus that single black tea and four pints of water, were all that passed my lips on day 5. If you’d said to me at the start of the Ration Challenge that I’d survive on that little, I’d have laughed. But the sobering reality is that many refugees do – often for years on end – and without enough ration packs to feed every single person in a camp, some will survive on even less.
So, if you can sponsor me, please, please do. Just £3 can feed a Syrian refugee in a camp in Jordan for an entire week – the same price as a takeaway coffee en route to work in the morning. Puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?
Click here to sponsor my Ration Challenge – and to find out more about it all…