The Odyssey

            Here I am.  It's 8:30 and I am sitting alone in the Boise airport waiting for my flight to Seattle.  This may be the beginning of my Senior Project, but it is by no means the beginning of my trip.  I am seven days in to a truly epic odyssey of twenty-six days, four trips across the country, seven places of accommodation, and six modes of transportation.  This past week, I spent time in Stratton, VT competing for my final time at the U.S. Freestyle Championships.  It was a fabulous week and a marvelous end to my career in freestyle skiing, but I have returned, exhausted, sore, and sick.   This week I will be in Seattle working with Food Lifeline.  The next week, I will fly to New York for a week and a half to work with Yorkville Common Pantry in Harlem.  After a brief stop in Connecticut for a college orientation, I will head home for the second leg of my project.  
           For my Senior Project, I plan on teasing out and attempting to define the essence of hunger.  I am intrigued  by the dichotomy between the universal nature of hunger (we all feel it, we all understand what it means to have no food) and the millions of individual contexts that create it.  I like to imagine a group of people standing in a food line.  Each one is hungry, each one has, in some way, been failed by society or themselves to the point that they can no longer access the most basic of human necessities: nourishment.  Yet, each one of those people, each one of those faces is unique.  Each one has a story tell.  Through my work with the Hunger Coalition, I have a complex understanding of the major contexts that create hungry people within our own Wood River Valley.  I can identify the broad stereotypes that would characterize those in the Wood River Valley food line.  However, I have almost no understanding of the contexts within which people are hungry in urban environments.  I am aware of the stereotypes, but I want to look far more closely.  Thus, my time in Seattle and New York will be spent learning from the people who give and receive aid about hunger outside of the valley.
          For the second phase of my project, I will return to the Wood River Valley to spend two weeks recording the stories of the Hunger Coalition's clients.  I would like to give them a forum in which they can tell their stories, vent their feelings, and express what they would like the rest of the valley to know and understanding.  I will be compiling these stories into a "This American Life" style audio documentary that can be used for public education and as an awareness-builder for the Hunger Coalition. 
         The woman at the flight desk is calling "all rows, all passengers."  It is time to begin my Senior Project.  Let the hunger stories begin!