Quote:
Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23375427?GT1=10856
HALLOWELL, Maine - Jonathan McCullum was in perfect health at 155 pounds when he left last summer to spend the school year as an exchange student in Egypt.
But when he returned home to Maine just four months later, the 5-foot-9 teenager weighed a mere 97 pounds and was so weak that he struggled to carry his baggage or climb a flight of stairs. Doctors said he was at risk for a heart attack.
McCullum says he was denied sufficient food while staying with a family of Coptic Christians, who fast for more than 200 days a year, a regimen unmatched by other Christians.
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The story seems a little fishy to me.
I suppose the kid's dad might be right and if he had a form of Stockholm Syndrome that might explain it, but 95% of teenagers that I have known who weren't suffering from an eating disorder, would have eaten enough away from home that not getting enough to eat for breakfast and dinner wouldn't have equaled starvation. If he didn't have enough money to buy food away from home, it seems like he would have approached his parents about sending more money rather than starving.
And when the teacher sent the email about the boy needing to go home, a normal parental follow up would have involved finding out why from multiple sources and when you found out had lost that much weight, bringing him home.
On the other hand, the comments from the host family are really defensive and weird too. Who measures how much a persons eats by the length of the meal or complains about the cost of food for a teenage boy relative to a teenage girl?
I just think there's a lot more to this story.
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