Roughing it on campus
Rice students to build shantytown, live on $2 a day to aid world’s poor

You don’t know poverty until you’ve experienced it, and that’s what about 50 Rice students are prepared to do when they build themselves a shantytown at the heart of the campus next week.

	Rice students Rashmi Kamath, Jeremy Goodreau and Matt Stearns test  materials for a dwelling as they plan for the $2-a-day challenge that will take place at Rice next Tuesday through Friday near the  Brochstein Pavilion.

While their peers are settling into their dorm rooms and figuring out where their classes are, the students will sacrifice their lives of relative comfort for four days and three nights of living rough, all to raise money and awareness for poverty-related causes.

Inspired by a similar project by students at University of Mary Washington in Fredricksburg, Va., some Rice students will challenge themselves to live with little more than makeshift wooden shanties, water bottles and eating utensils.

”Over 40 percent of the world population lives on less than $2 a day,” said Rice senior and challenge coordinator Samantha Teltser, ”and almost all of these people live in regions we rarely see.”

The challenge, to take place next Tuesday through Friday near Brochstein Pavilion, is being coordinated and sponsored by three student organizations: Engineers Without Borders (EWB), Rice Microfinance (RMF) and Humanitarian Medical Outreach (HMO). With their first collaborative effort to raise funds and awareness for their causes, they hope to foster a greater understanding of the lives of the world’s poor and a commitment among the Rice community and Greater Houstonians to alleviate poverty.

They also hope to build upon recent successes. In the last year, EWB has sent students to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras to help communities develop wells and water distribution systems. HMO has sent students to three continents to improve health care delivery in low-resource settings. More recently, RMF was honored by former President Bill Clinton at his Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) for its efforts to provide loans to poor entrepreneurs in developing countries.

When Josh Ozer, co-president of RMF, heard about the University of Mary Washington project at a CGI U event earlier this year, he realized it would be an excellent way for campus organizations to collaborate.

”We all have such similar goals that working together on this just seemed natural,” said RMF Co-president Dillon Eng. “It helps make this a campuswide effort that can bring students with similar interests together.”

The shantytown will be open to the public for tours and discussion 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-7 p.m. and will conclude Friday afternoon. You can also follow the students’ progress on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/2dollarOwl.