A Dollar-a-Day Dinner

The International Medicine Club recently hosted Dollar-A-Day: A Poverty Awareness Event benefiting Breedlove Foods Inc..

This year's banquet raised $1,015 for the only commercial-sized nonprofit processor of food that has distributed more than 1.02 billion servings of food globally.

Nicole Drawbridge, first-year medical student and committee chair, said the goal of Dollar-A-Day was to raise awareness about the issues of global poverty and the challenges to its eradication.

According to the Breedlove website, approximately 925 million people in the world do not receive adequate nutrition to maintain health. Particularly disturbing is the fact that around 30,000 of these individuals die unnecessarily every day from a hunger-related disease.

Upon arrival at the Dollar-a-Day event, guests participated in interactive presentations on the broad spectrum of living conditions in countries around the world. All guests received the same meal, but some had to overcome different types of simulated barriers before sitting down to eat.

The guest speaker was John Thomas, M.D., founder of Operation Hope and a renowned surgeon in Lubbock. Operation Hope is a locally-based nonprofit organization that seeks to provide medical support and community aid in developing countries around the world. Thomas has worked in Bolivia, Malawi, Kenya and India, and most recently in Iraq and Haiti.

Thomas’ role as a physician and his first-hand, in-country experience will provide a unique perspective on providing aid and medical care in these impoverished areas.

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