I love everything about being able to go to work every day and write for a living.

I love interviews with women who spent their 21^st birthdays on anti-aircraft artillery bases during the First World War. I love sitting down over a cup of tea with a couple that have baked over 300,000 Anzac cookies since 1992 to raise money for children with cancer. I love listening to the way a man, whose father has just died, can talk about his dad with such love, admiration and pride. I love sitting in an old-fashioned council chamber and watching grown men yell at each other over bicycle lanes.

I love that for the rest of my life I get to listen to people tell me about their lives. Their trivial worries. Their heart-wrenching tales. Their fears. Dreams. Loves. Losses. New homes. Old heartaches.

I’ve never found my own story interesting. Why would I? I live it. What’s interesting to me is sitting down with a stranger and living a different life. Their recollections. Their eyes. The story that they don’t find interesting.

I’m interested in politics. Yes, even local government. I’m interested in the way we depict others. I’m interested in racism. In war. In the environment. In mental illness. In sexuality. In refugees. In international affairs. In history. In science. In mass media.

I’m interested in the stories you tell and the stories you’re told.

I get to tell those stories now.

Nothing could make me happier.

http://unilifemagazine.com.au/

If you type my name in that shiny little search bar at the top you’ll find all the articles I’ve written.

It seems superfluous to post them here again when following a little link will lead you right to them.

For five days in August I was one of them.

Live Below The Line is an initative founded by The Global Poverty Project’s Richard Fleming and the Oaktree Foundation’s Nick Allardice who wanted to bring wider attention to the plight of all the people worldwide who suffer each and every day from poverty and hunger.

The premise is simple.

For five days in August (the 2nd to the 6th) participants would feed themselves on only $2 a day.

Friends and family were asked to support participants with donations that would be used to fund education programs run by the Global Poverty Project and the Oaktree Foundation at home and abroad.

It didn’t take much thinking before I decided to participate.

In January I spent six weeks volunteering in hill tribe communities in rural Thailand.

I saw how poverty could affect people and how education could make such a startling and important difference.

It was in Thailand that I became aware of just how real global poverty was.

I firmly believe that education is the best answer to fighting global poverty and it is clear to me that global poverty is something that every individual needs to address.

At home I would never be considered wealthy.

I was raised by a single mother who works ridiculously hard to provide for her three children.

I am only able to afford to attend university as a fulltime student because of the money that is given to me by the government.

Yet I am rich by world standards, with more money to my name than 75 per cent of the world’s population.

To know this and yet do nothing would be entirely selfish.

Living below the line was hard.

I won’t pretend that after two days in I didn’t want to quit and eat a chocolate bar or some hot chips because I did, more than once.

However, I’d made a decision to do this and I’m very stubborn.

I was going to go through with it.

In preparation, I visited the local supermarket with a vague plan and a meagre ten dollars in my wallet.

I spent a good hour wandering the aisles, picking things up and putting things back.

Pasta or rice?

Oats or bread?

Apples or bananas?

My final shopping basket included:

• 750g Oats – $1.61 1kg
• White Rice – $1.79
• 200g Dried Apricots – $1.99
• 400g Tinned Tomatoes – $0.59
• 400g Tinned Lentils – $0.89
• 400g Tinned Chickpeas – $0.89
• 500g Frozen Vegetables – $1.39
• 2 Red Delicious Apples – $0.79

Total: $9.95

It didn’t look like a lot of food and I’ll admit I began to doubt whether this was a sensible challenge.

Day one dawned and I was excited – at this point living below the line seemed like a new challenge.

But after a bowl of oats cooked with water and four sliced dried apricots my enthusiasm was dwindling.

The food was boring and bland; eating became a forced behaviour that I did not enjoy.

I made it through to lunch with little hassle and heated my pre-prepared meal.

Rice with vegetables, lentils and chickpeas.

Again minus any seasonings – flavour was a luxury I could not afford.

I got through the first day without a hitch, quietly surviving on $2 a day while many of my university friends were eating their $8 café baguettes and looking quite shocked when I told them what I was attempting.

My confidence was burgeoned by the relative ease with which I had passed the first day.

This was going to be easy, I thought.

I was wrong.

Tuesday followed a very similar pattern to Monday albeit now accompanied by a dull ache in the pit of my stomach.

By Wednesday I was dizzy, shaking and suffering incredibly painful headaches.

I’d read that I might experience withdrawal systems and dismissed it as trivial.

They weren’t.

I spend most of Wednesday sleeping with all the lights off in an attempt to dull the pain in my temples.

On Thursday I had recovered but I was tired and a feeling of constant weakness had set in.

I was constantly hungry, the grumbling of my stomach kept me awake for hours at night.

At work on Friday I was a zombie.

I sat in front of the computer and typed away in a trance.

I do not understand how anyone could walk 20 kilometres to collect water for their families and cart it back in that condition.

I would not have had the strength; I could barely form coherent sentences and for the journalist in me this was troublesome enough.

I stayed up until midnight on Friday because I could not face another night of tossing and turning in hunger.

I’d lasted the five days and I jumped at the chance for a proper meal before bed – even if that meal happened to be in the middle of the night.

However, the hardest part of the whole experience was not the hunger, the lethargy or the headaches, though they certainly weren’t fun, the hardest thing was the lifestyle.

I am used to living to a certain standard.

Not a decadent lifestyle by anyone’s standard but a lifestyle of relative comfort and choice.

On Wednesday I wanted to drink chocolate milk and I couldn’t. On Thursday I wanted to eat some kiwifruit and hot chips and I couldn’t.

This might sound trivial but it didn’t feel trivial.

Everyday I was restricted to a monotonous daily meal of oats, rice, vegetable stew and half an apple.

Food usually plays a very social role in our lives.

We ritualise it, we socialise over it and we create memories all around food.

It makes us happy and it brings us together.

For five days I hated food, I forced myself to eat spoonful after spoonful for the nutritional value alone.

Over a billion people worldwide eat food only for it’s nutritional value and for those people it’s rarely enough to sustain a semi functional lifestyle.

These people die from hunger.

I didn’t realise how lucky we are.

What I did was not brave, it was not courageous and it was not special.

It wasn’t even all that hard – I can say that now that I have a full stomach.

What I did was what 1.4 billion people are forced to do everyday and they don’t just feed themselves on $2 dollars a day, they live completely on $2 dollars a day.

A feat that would probably be impossible in our decadent Western society.

What I did was a small ripple in a big pond but it got people talking.

I had a number of truly revealing dialogues with friends, family, classmates and strangers about the heartbreaking realities of this world we all share.

I raised over $700 that will go towards the Oaktree Foundation’s education program in Cambodia where teachers will be trained to educate the large youth population.

According to the latest tally on the Live Below The Line website, all the participants have so far collectively raised almost $450,000.

I got a very small taste of what it must be like for the 1.4 billion humans living on less than $2 a day.

Even if I only made the tiniest difference it was worth it.

In fact it’s fairly shit. I had to nap today. NAP! Like an old man after a large roast lunch or a small child after an extended morning of playing lego and hide and seek. NAP! Seriously! When today’s blood test comes back with ‘no definitive results’ like the previous three I am going to be mighty pissed. In fact I am already mighty pissed. I’m not sure what is causing it. But I am very very angry of late. I stomp around a lot and get very cross at people. Sometimes I send angry passive aggressive emails. It’s really very sad. I should take my anger out in some form of physical show of physical-ness but that would require energy. WHICH I DON’T HAVE. Thank you very much body. If I could get into a war of words with my ill health I most certainly would and I would NOT hold back. However, that is impossible as ill health is something you suffer from and not someone you can yell at. Disappointing I know!

On another note. I have filled my iPod. Now I have to make selective decisions about which music is most important to me. Which is just cruel really. EFF YOU APPLE and your 30 GBs which is actually only 27 GBs because you had to take those 3 extra GBs and use them for necessary software and all that bullshit. What if I needed those extra 3 GBs of music because I could be somewhere one day where it is crucial that I can listen to what equates to 12.2 days of music without the possibility of getting to a computer and updating my music and also charging my iPod which is old and has a ridiculously short battery life.

To quote Buffy: Buffy: ‘Thank you, logic boy. Did I mention this is a rant? Sense really has no place in it’.

End rant.

PS. still no profound thoughts.

Thanks for showing up. It means a lot to me. I can wear tights again. I know it doesn’t sound like much but that’s a pretty huge deal. Also it might rain. That is awesome. And I probably won’t pass out anytime in the delightful 3 months you stick around for.

Did I mention that I love you. Because I do.

Yours,

Alicia

So I plan to work on this from now on. Hopefully next time I blog (which, lets be honest, isn’t all that often) I will have come up with an impressively profound thought. We shall see.

I have something to declare, something that may be controversial, unheard of or even labeled unaustralian. It’s a risk I am willing to take. Here goes.

I hate you, please don’t come this year.

I hate heat, bright sun and hot concrete. I hate the beach, swimming and sand in my clothes. I hate short shorts, bare midriffs and the large expanse of, generally orange, skin that goes on show.

I hate lying on my bed with the air conditioner blowing out hot air because it cannot even cope with the heat. I hate that I can’t sleep with a quilt because it is too hot but I can’t sleep without one because I feel too exposed.

I hate sticking to bus seats, uni chairs and basically any surface that I connect with bare skin. I hate that I can no longer wear tights and actually have to expose my pale white legs (which will not tan thanks to my English father) to the world.

I hate how summer is apparently the season to eat melons; melons are disgusting and should be avoided all year round as they as in winter. I hate how my car makes awful screeching noises when I try to use the air conditioner and instead I have to wind down my window and hope a cool breeze just happens to blow in.

I hate how I often get dehydrated and faint. This usually happens when I am working and I awake to some customer’s shrill cries of ‘help she’s on the ground’. Please just leave me there, don’t you know heat rises?

I hate Christmas. I hate that my two most hated things, heat and organised greeting card holidays, happen at the same time. I hate how people lose the ability to be polite and decent when faced with either heat or Christmas. I hate being yelled at because it is too hot/we don’t sell that here.

I hate how each year gets progressively hotter. Because 45 degrees just wasn’t quite hot enough the first time around. I hate C02 for this temperature increase. I hate CFC’s for the hole in the ozone layer that means I get burnt after spending .002 of a second in the sun.

Mostly I hate that summer is only a month and a half away.

Fuck you Summer, I hate you.

Yours Sincerely,

Alicia

As of 2008 genetically engineered (GE) canola crops are being grown in New South Wales and Victoria for the first time. The canola is engineered by global plant biotechnology company Monsanto and is know as Roundup Ready (GT73) canola.

GT73 canola is banned in Austria and remains unapproved within the European Union. In Monsanto’s own feeding studies GT73 was seen to increase the liver sizes of test rats by up to 16 per cent.

However Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) are unfazed by these issues and have approved GT73 canola for production and consumption without further testing.

In the Greenpeace report ‘Eating in the Dark’, released in 2008, it was revealed that “FSANZ is one of only a few regulators in the world to have approved every single application it has received for GE food products”. This includes many GE products that have been banned in the EU, Japan and South Africa.

In Australia it is not mandatory to label GE products and as such eliminates a consumers right to choose.

Director of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research SA Judy Carman, along with 15 other leading scientists, have written a letter to the federal government calling for an independent review of the safety assessment regime for GE products and comprehensive labelling of all GE foods.

“There is an urgent need for the full labelling of GM (genetically modified) foods, comprehensive safety testing by independent researchers of all GM foods currently in the marketplace, and of all subsequent GM foods before they enter the marketplace,” said Carman.

It appears that most Australian’s agree with her. In a 2008 Newspoll survey 90 per cent of Australian’s surveyed wanted food products containing GE crops labelled.

“It is very clear that Australians want to avoid GM food and want it clearly labelled. However, glaring loopholes in our current labelling laws do not leave shoppers with a choice,” said Greenpeace GE campaigner Michelle Sheather.

Monsanto Public Affairs Manager Honi McNaughton disagrees, “any changes to the current labelling system could significantly increase costs to farmers and consumers”, she said.

For more information on GE foods and to download a list of products containing GE derivatives visit: http://www.truefood.org.au/OurRightToKnow

First published: http://www.radelaide.net/culture