Day 8: Playing for Food

Today, after work, I set to work at FreeRice.org, a website where you can play knowledge-based games and earn money for the United Nations World Food Programme.

I've been to Free Rice many times in the past. The way the site works (or so I thought) was that you played a vocabulary game where you chose the meaning of words and, the longer you play, the more rice gets donated to prevent hunger around the world. Each question answered correctly gains 10 grains of rice. The words get progressively harder, and I usually end up fluctuating between levels 40 and 45 out of 60, and find it a fairly entertaining way to pass the time. (The rice is paid for by the banner advertisements on the page as you're playing the game.)

Since I knew I would blog about it, I was paying a bit more attention to the links on the site and I noticed one I hadn't seen before: Change Subjects. By clicking on it, I discovered that "English Vocabulary" was only one of the many subjects that they offered you to play for rice. The full list of subjects is:

• Art - Famous Paintings
• Chemistry - Chemical Symbols (Basic)
• Chemistry - Chemical Symbols (Full List)
• English - English Grammar
• English - English Vocabulary
• Geography - Identify Countries on the Map
• Geography - World Capitals
• Language Learning - French
• Language Learning - German
• Language Learning - Italian
• Language Learning - Spanish
• Math - Basic Math (Pre-Algebra)
• Math - Multiplication Table

I played the English Vocabulary, English Grammar (reached level 5 of 5), Identify Countries on the Map (level 4 of 5), Basic Math (level 10 of 10), World Capital (level 4 of 5), and French (level 9 of 10 - who'd have guessed the foreign language classes stuck that well?).

According to the Free Rice website FAQ, in countries where rice is a staple, they provide about 400 grams of rice per person per day. About 48 grains of rice is a gram. So this means that 19,200 grains of rice will feed a starving person for a day.

Today, with only about an hour's worth of play, I earned about 5,000 grains of rice.

So, if I can keep this sort of activity up for each of the remaining 32 days, the World Food Programme would be able to provide about 8 days worth of food for starving people in developing countries ... and my own knowledge of vocabulary, geography, and French (who knows, I might try some Italian, Spanish or German) might even increase a bit.

Day 3 Follow-Up

Today, Amber and I received our test kits for the Be the Match National Marrow Donor Program. We rubbed cotton swabs on the inside of our moths and placed them into the envelopes to be sent back. They'll go back out in the mail tomorrow and, in relatively short order, we'll be placed on the registry to donate bone marrow.

Day 3: Bone Marrow Donor Registry

For our third day of giving, Amber and I both registered with the "Be The Match" National Marrow Donor Program as potential bone marrow donors. We will receive cotton swabs in the mail, which we'll use to take cell samples from the inside of our cheeks, and then return for testing. We'll remain in the registry, and when we come up as a match for a needy recipient, our bone marrow will be extracted and donated, possibly saving a life.

We were inspired to this particular giving opportunity by a woman in class with Amber, whose young (three or four year old) son suffered from a form of leukemia. He immediately went on chemotherapy, and they set out to find a match. They ended up finding a matching donor from somewhere along the Pacific coast. The boy is now seven years old and is doing fine, all thanks to a stranger from across the country.

Now all of this testing and tracking takes money, so when you sign up for the registry they request a $100 donation to cover the costs associated with the donation. (We went ahead and put our $200 on the credit card. It's normally not a good idea to give with credit, but since we wanted to get on the registry as soon as possible, decided it would be okay this time since we'll pay it back with the paycheck next week. It just didn't seem in the spirit of the project to sign up for the registry and not cover the associated costs at the same time.) If you aren't able to donate money, though, you should still sign up for the registry, as long as you meet the guidelines. Donations from other sources, such as Jeff Gordon, can cover these costs even if you can't.

What amazed me was that the site also contains information about donating umbilical cord blood, and I really didn't realize that this was an option. I was vaguely aware of medical uses for the umbilical cord, and I knew that there were (expensive) services you could sign up for to save the umbilical cord blood in case your baby had a problem down the road, but in the wealth of information covered with the birth of our recent child, Gideon (three months and one week old!), I don't recall the issue of donating umbilical cord blood even coming up. If it did come up, it wasn't a big deal.

The website has a neat video about it, but it's not particularly informative on the details. It does make it clear that certain ethnicities, such as African-American, have high incidences of blood disorders, so they require a diverse pool of donor blood cells to get the proper matches. The reason why the umbilical cord blood is useful is, according to the site, "Cord blood is rich in blood-forming cells that can be used in transplants for patients with leukemia, lymphoma and many other life-threatening diseases."

At some point, you'd think that a person would have said, "Hey, pay attention - this stuff either goes in the incinerator or saves a life. Which do you want?" I mean, donating bone marrow is a big inconvenience (from what I've heard); donating umbilical cord blood, not so much. They just take that stuff away anyway, and you never see it again.

Part of me wonders if the reason it wasn't more prominently discussed was because we were at a Catholic hospital, but I wouldn't imagine that the use of umbilical cord blood would conflict with the philosophical doctrines at the heart of the Catholic church's opposition to stem cell research. (I'm not a biologist, but I do know that blood cells and stem cells are different.) Maybe people just don't want to be pushy at a time like that, but this is something that I really regret we didn't do.

So, if you're pregnant and reading this, or if you know someone who's pregnant, check out the information (or pass it along). Every parent should make an informed decision about this, and not just trust that your doctors will pass along every relevant option.

After all, your baby's first act in this world could be to save a life.