The year before I came to graduate school in the United States, I taught English and Social Studies at my old high school in Bombay. On the first day of teacher training, our impassioned headmistress Ms. Shirin Darasha, opened with, “There are three things you need to know about being a teacher. I want you to remember these every day as we start the new school year: Encourage, encourage, encourage.”

CHANGE alumni reunited in Boston earlier this month. Photo by: Cheryl Colombo/Oxfam America.

To encourage means to impart courage; to embolden; to give support to; and to foster. Oxfam America’s youth leadership program, the CHANGE Initiative, lives and breathes this value. You can see it in the faces of the 50 or so college students who come to Boston every summer for leadership and advocacy training, which prepares them to promote social change on a local and global level. They are scrubbed full of hope and excitement, and their energy to make a difference is palpable in how they respond to and engage with Oxfam staff during the week-long intensive training. To date, CHANGE has trained nearly 550 students from over 200 campuses.

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During my first year in book publishing, I would often balk at parties when people asked, “What do you do? Are you an editor?” I had to begin by explaining that working with authors and booksellers to bring a book to market was the other half of the profession, but I did not like casting myself as a marketer because their inevitable response would be a smug, quasi-judgmental “ah.” Very quickly, I made peace with the fact that because my work involved selling books and ideas−not soap or violent video games−there was inherent meaning in what I did.

Now, I work as a press officer for branding at Oxfam America, where, given our mission, marketing is still sometimes a dirty word. Which brings me to Nick Kristof’s assertion in a recent column: that toothpaste sellers do a better job of peddling their wares than non-profits do, even in situations of urgent need.

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Sahera begins her morning duties as a rag-picker in Lucknow, India, where Oxfam funds a school and health programs for working children. According to Peter Singer, kids—in India and elsewhere—are one of the groups most at risk from poverty-related diseases. Photo: Tom Pietrasik / Oxfam

When I visited my hometown of Bombay, India, last month, I found myself trapped in complex moral dilemmas, even as I went through the motions of everyday life. There, the urban poor live smashed up against a growing affluent class. Despair, hunger, and homelessness rest uneasily side-by-side with designer boutiques and Western-inspired malls.

I remember tightly clutching my ice cream cone on a crowded commuter train, the sticky cream melting down my wrist in the midday heat. But how could I eat it when a little boy stared at me, wide-eyed, hungry, and begging for spare change?

Back home in Boston, I attended a reading last week by the author Peter Singer. Singer, the renowned and prolific Princeton bioethicist, has championed animal rights and written passionately about the ethics of giving. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, posits the moral argument that each one of us has the power to make a difference in the fight against poverty.

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Right on the verge of the holiday gorging season, I’ve gotten a glimpse of what it means to be hungry.

It all began with a knee injury earlier this year. Deprived of my usual stress busters–running and yoga—I took to filling that extra time with food. So a few weeks ago, I decided to embark on a “cleanse.” Based on a book called If the Buddha Came to Dinner, the cleanse prescribed a restricted diet as a means of transformational nourishment: renewed energy; healthy eating; and clarity of mind, body, and spirit.

No matter how much and how often I ate, the first five days—when you can eat only fruit and vegetables—were tough. Caffeine withdrawal gave me headaches and nausea. Instead of my old friends, sugar and wheat, I had to turn to kale and beets. My dreams of chocolate croissants remained unfulfilled. Slowly, I began to get into the groove, but I was always hungry.

One Sunday, on a walk through the vast, tree-filled Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, I came upon a couple sitting on a blanket unwrapping sandwiches. My heart skipped a beat: Was that bread? Indeed, I saw olive bread glistening in the sun. Bits of juicy avocado. Potato chips…

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