Youth members, parents and volunteers with the Zion's Stone Church on Cemetery Road in New Ringgold held their 30 Hour Famine for World Hunger event at their church recently to raise and promote awareness for people throughout the world who are suffering with famine.

The 30 Hour Famine is an international youth movement to fight hunger. Every year, thousands of students in the United States participate in World Vision's 30 Hour Famine program. Participants go 30 hours without food and get a real taste of hunger while also having to deal with fake handicaps, such as bloated stomachs, blindness, deafness and many other conditions faced by third world countries.Youth group members were teamed up in tribes to compete in various themed activities. Every day, nearly 8,000 children under age 5 die because of hunger-related causes. In all, more than 24,000 kids lose their lives each day, most of them to poverty, disease and hunger.On average, one out of six people in the world suffer from famine or starvation, while around 1.4 billion people have to survive on less than $1.25 a day. These and other facts were taught to the youth during the famine program.Every year, World Vision distributes enough emergency food to fill 8,000 semi-trucks. Some of the activities held during the 30-hour famine consisted of making cardboard huts, surviving a man-powered earthquakes, scavenger hunts, muddy sock relay, food sampling and many other activities which were all themed around suffrage and strives of living with a very limited amount of food or clean water.For more information about next year's 30-hour famine or to make a donation, contact counselor Charlotte Haas Fritz at the church at (570) 386-5111.