Experiencing the Endurance Challenge

As part of our Amnesty group's Refugee Week efforts, some of us - and a local MSP - decided to do the CAP Endurance Challenge.  While I followed the given list plus £3.50 "extra", one colleague chose the approximate amount we calculated it cost (about £12.00?) and bought her own package.

I found that the concentration was on food, which became a major focus of the week, and mealtimes were very important, as I had no in-between snacks/coffees etc. which I seem to have got used to.  As such, my meals were reasonable, and I enjoyed tasting tinned fish after not having eaten fish for about two years.  I felt terribly deprived of fruit and veg - even though I grow spinach and lettuce, I felt bound not to touch it. I did give in towards the end, however, when the first few strawberries ripened!

Of course, the situation apart from food was comfortable: it's not necessary to have heating, but I had hot water, kettle, cooker, fridge and cooking implements. I realised that for the tinned food, one would need a tin opener, and unless a destitute person were living in a house or good hostel with such implements, they would virtually be unable to access their protein. And of course without the means to cook or boil water, they would have to exist on bread and La Vache Qui Rit cheese triangles: not a healthy prospect.

Transport, again being a pensioner with a free bus pass, I am privileged (even though I walk and cycle). But a planned trip to Glasgow by train had to be postponed as I wouldn't have the money for that. How do asylum-seeking destitute people get to where they need to go (to see lawyers, reach a hostel, pick up their food package or emergency money)?

I had to do without my normal newspaper, but then we do have libraries and the papers are in my own language: as is the free paper, so there is still access to news. And I didn't stop using my normal radio.

Once I automatically put on the washing machine, and realised afterwards that such would cost people without their own, and I should have washed by hand.

The exercise might not have helped anyone else to become more aware of how it feels to be dependent on a given provision of food and have to do without some of what are luxuries but which we now in our affluent society think of as part of normal daily life, but it did shake me up. I had thought I did live simply, but I now know I don't. I hope that the result will help me to be more disciplined in my lifestyle.... and go on trying to put out the message of "live more simply that others may simply live!"

Two important points to make finally: I had chosen to do it; people who have to take limited charity have not chosen to do so. And I only did it for a short time, with a definite end.

(I must confess the grapes and oranges - not to mention strawberries - were wonderful to celebrate the end of the Challenge - as was the Sunday Herald newspaper.)