Students to live under cardboard in solidarity with Gaza

The initiative is part in the 2025 Caritas Challenge and the students will live and eat simply for six hours at the college and for a further 10 hours at home. The event will take place on September 12.

The event involves planning and building cardboard shelters, eating plain cooked rice for dinner, a liturgy and time of reflection, plain popcorn for supper and various games and activities. The aim is to “eat and live as simply as possible for six hours on-site and continue in that spirit as we return to our own homes overnight and throughout Saturday morning”, the college stated.

The activity is one of solidarity with those experiencing extreme hardship. All money raised will go specifically to Caritas work in Gaza.

The cardboard city at Garin College is one of four types of activity suggested to Catholic schools by Caritas for the annual Caritas Challenge. The activities are “Live It”, “Move It”, “Sweat It” and “Stop It”.

The “Live It” challenge provides an opportunity to experience something that millions of families in the world do every day: to live without a home and the comforts taken by many for granted.

“One billion people live in slums – that’s one seventh of the world’s population. Slums are overcrowded settlements where people build their houses from whatever scrap materials they can find – a few pieces of tin, some timber, cardboard or plastic,” Caritas said.

Caritas Challenge events take place at schools throughout Aotearoa New Zealand from February to December. Evaluations and funds raised are sent to Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand at the end of the school year.

On August 22, the United Nations officially declared a famine in Gaza. On August 25, Caritas Internationalis issued a strongly worded statement responding to the “man-made famine and assault on Gaza City”.

In an interview with Vatican News, the director of integral human development at Caritas Internationalis, Victor Genina, said that “more than 250 children have died of starvation”.

This is why Caritas wants “this to reach an end. And we call the authorities involved in this to put an end to the deliberate attack on civilians and health personnel”.

As the death toll for civilians in Gaza reaches more than 60,000 – including more than 200 journalists and over 180 humanitarian workers – Caritas’ statement calls out the “deliberate famine that the authorities have inflicted on the civilian population”.

Caritas also denounces “vehemently” the plans by Israel to move “more than 1,000,000 of civilians in a concentration camp in the south of the Strip, without any humanitarian acceptable minimum conditions”.

At his public audience on August 27, Pope Leo XIV appealed for “all hostages to be freed, a permanent ceasefire to be reached, the safe entry of humanitarian aid to be facilitated, and humanitarian law to be fully respected – especially the obligation to protect civilians and the prohibitions against collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force, and the forced displacement of populations”.

FULL STORY

Cardboard City (Garin College)

LIVE IT – Me Whakaora (Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand)

Take Up The Challenge (Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand)

Caritas Internationalis: Peace and respect for human rights go hand-in-hand (Vatican News)

New papal appeal for peace in Gaza | News Headlines | Catholic Culture (CWN)

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