Hunger for adventure

COEUR d'ALENE - Two young men from Maine are on a cross-country journey to see if they can make a dent in America's hunger problems, and Idaho is the 35th state on their list.

Myles Chung, 22, and Dan Emery, 31, of Augusta, are visiting the lower 48 in 48 weeks, rarely going faster than 35 miles per hour as they ride from location to location on their Honda Ruckus scooters. Their goal is to examine hunger needs in various communities by talking to individuals, food banks, community garden organizers and anyone who may help them find a path to the solution. They have dubbed their mission "The American Community Project."

Chung and Emery are presently camping outside Sandpoint. They said they visited Community Action Partnership in Coeur d'Alene when they first arrived in the Gem State and found the North Idaho area, like many others, experiences seasonal "booms and busts" when it comes to food donations.

"The issue of hunger is one of the webs of a huge spider web of the problems that pertain to poverty throughout the U.S.," Chung said Thursday while stopping in the Hayden City Park. "A lot of people think of hunger as a domino effect; if they knock that out, then everything will fall into place. But unfortunately, with hunger and housing and energy and job security, you have to tackle all of them with the same amount of fervor and commitment."

The concept for The American Community Project came about a few years ago when Emery was visiting friends in Paraguay.

"There were kids like 5 and 6 years old who were on the street corner begging or trying to sell things or trying to wash your windows," he said. "We came back from a pizza place and I had most of it left, so called them over to the car and handed them the box. My friend's like, 'I get what you're doing, but if the wrong people see you do that, they'll wait for us to leave, they'll beat up the kids and take the food from them.' That kind of hit me funny, that I'd never thought that just giving someone food could actually be potentially harmful."

Emery, who has worked as a marketing specialist and served as an Augusta city council member, began to see hunger in a different light and realized its effects were really eating away at him. He wanted to do something about it.

"That planted the seed that hunger is more than giving people food. Over the last three years, the food insecurity rate has gone from 12 percent to 15 percent," he said. "So even though we're putting all this time, energy and resources into trying to solve the problem, it's still getting worse, so there's something that is missing."

Now, he and Chung are making videos, recording interviews and seeing with their own eyes the impact and repercussions of hunger across the country. They are seeing hope, despair, triumph and failure, and they're on a mission to unravel the mystery. They plan to write books about their experiences, as well as hold seminars, teach others about what they learned and maybe appear on national networks to inspire American citizens to eat well and find long-term solutions to the problems.

"The food banks are not a solution in themselves," Emery said. "It's a Band-Aid to the larger problem."

"I want to try to create that spark in them," Chung said. "All of it needs that little burst for them to utilize, or else it just falls in on itself, and we don't get anywhere."

The duo raised $16,000 for their journey and they plan to donate more funds raised to entities in about every state. They'll be leaving North Idaho Sept. 9 on their way to Helena, Mont., then driving with their 80-pound backpacks across the northern U.S. back home to Maine, where they will arrive Dec. 3. As of Thursday, they had traveled just more than 13,000 miles.

Info: www.acproject.org.