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In which living on rations becomes a first-world problem, writes Lisa Scott.

Lisa Scott

I signed up on a whim, late at night after a few wines. I would show solidarity.

"You're bleeping kidding,'' said the Mountain Man when I suggested he do the Oxfam Refugee Ration Challenge, too. "I'm not going without me tucker.''

The rations arrived in the mail. I've seen boxes of tampons bigger: inside, a tin of sardines, 1920g of rice, 400g of tinned red kidney beans, 85g of chickpeas, 170g of dried lentils and 300ml of vegetable oil plus two "vouchers'' for flour and additional rice that I'd need to buy to supplement the rations. This works out to be under the minimum energy requirements for the average adult, but it's what refugees survive on and sometimes there's not enough to go around, so they have to share. People taking part in the ration challenge raise money to provide food, education and medical care for Syrian refugees living in Jordan.

Day one, I "accidentally'' cooked half my rice allowance (more wantonly, I thought there'd be more somehow, call it a delusion of privilege), still, my stomach thought my throat had been cut. I was so hungry I couldn't sleep. Emotionally, that classic lady-excuse for bad behaviour, "hanger'', didn't touch the sides of it. I was hell on wheels. At 4am, after bitching and moaning so much the dog hid under the table, I stole some rice crackers from the pantry and finally fell asleep. The next day, "Are you going to eat that cheese IN FRONT of me!?'' I yelled at Mr Most Important Meal of the Day is Every Meal. "I bet the Syrian refugees don't threaten to kill the UN workers if they walk past them eating a piece of cheese,'' he said. "This ration challenge is a bit much.''

At the supermarket later that evening, I was seething. I'd been shirty all day. "Want a bottle of wine?'' said the Mountain Man in care-in-the-community tones as we rounded the beer aisle. "No wine,'' I said. "No dairy, no coffee, no vegetables. No spices.'' Nothing but food meant for endurance; bland, unenticing and nutritionally lacking.

"For seven days?''

"Yes.''

"Scissors. This is going to be fun.''

It was not. It was a cheerless, joyless existence.

Day two, and I couldn't live without coffee. I know how that sounds. People live without limbs, but I couldn't suffer a lack of stovetop espresso. Not only that, I snuck cake out of the pantry, and was perhaps the only refugee who managed to find eggs and spinach on the arduous trek to the camp at Damascus.

On day three I ate the sardines, the chickpeas, a sachet of cup-a-soup and picked a fight with the Mountain Man about pies.

On day four, I gave up. I couldn't do it. Probably because, to paraphrase Tom Petty, I don't have to live like a refugee. More than anything I was heartsick. My greed made a mockery of other people's suffering. The guilt was worse than the hunger. Because this is not my life. I am not, as Charlotte Grimshaw writes in Mazarine, part of that frantic swirl of humanity, "hungry, distressed, desperate, sleeping rough, lost, banned, walled out, hunted, unwanted.'' I wasn't that desperate, that backed into a corner. I have choices. They don't. It was easy for me to fail.

Remember doing the 40-hour famine at high school? I seem to remember it coincided with Live Aid "the day music changed the world'': rich white rockers singing Do they know it's Christmas? to rich white kids. My girlfriends and I used it as an excuse to stay in our pyjamas for two days straight watching television, eating barley sugars and drinking Lucozade - just like the starving Ethiopians. Victims of famine would have been incredulous. Two days later, we gorged ourselves on chips, cake and lollies. I wonder what our take-home lesson had been? That lip-service is enough, that being seen to care equates to caring? Whatever is was, it can't have stuck because here we are 33 years later, no further ahead, we haves still don't like to not.

How indulgent my life is, how I take it for granted that I have the world at my fingertips, a voice. I couldn't eat like a Syrian refugee for a week. Maybe you can. Sign up today at www.rationchallenge.org.nz.