What’s really nice is when the Internet allows for a little armchair activism. I say that without a trace of cynicism in my voice because, with most people chained to their desks all day every day, armchair activism is all any of us have a chance to do before going home and crashing into bed. Plus, the more armchair activism there is in the world and on the Internet, the further said activism will go and the more impact it can make. With that in mind, the website Free Rice makes it easy to make a difference while you are sitting on hold with the insurance broker, while you are eating a meatball sub at your desk, while you are waiting for a conference call to wrap up. In other words, Free Rice takes your dead time and makes it useful.
The sister site of Poverty.com, Free Rice is a nonprofit vocabulary-cum-activism website that gives visitors a vocabulary test and, for every word that a visitor gets right, donates 20 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. Needless to say, it’s addictive. The vocabulary test is as long as you want it to be ( i.e., the site will just keep hitting you with words so long as you want to be hit with them), meaning that I sat down to test my skills and looked up 20 minutes later, thinking, "Ack! I have work to do!" But, when I looked at what I had actually done in those 20 minutes I felt a bit better: I had made a donation of 1,000 grains of rice. If I do that every day for a year, that’s not a bad contribution to the world at all.
The site started in October, and since my last visit 9,481,828,970 English vocabulary questions have been answered correctly by people around the world (making for a total of 189,636,579,400 grains of rice that have been donated through the site to the United Nations). And this number will only continue to grow if we, at our desks, realize that these desks are not what is keeping us from getting out there and making a difference.
