Student Starved by Stingy Egypt Host Fam

[UGAalum94]

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.

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.

[preciousjeni]

He got to skin and bones somehow. Obviously he wasn't eating or at least wasn't keeping the food down. This is crazy.

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by preciousjeni

He got to skin and bones somehow. Obviously he wasn't eating or at least wasn't keeping the food down. This is crazy.

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that I thought he was eating; I just wonder how much might have been related to his own elective behavior, rather than the restrictions of his host family.

Sometimes teenagers do weird stuff like try to punish someone else by harming themselves. They demonstrate weird thinking that in this case must have gone along the lines of "I'll show my host family that they didn't serve enough food by refusing to compensate by eating more when I'm away from their home."

Well, sure the host family didn't serve him enough food under those circumstances maybe, but they didn't starve him if he had other access to food and money, which he should have if his parents were communicating with him and acting normally.

And let's all learn this lesson too: it's one thing if your kid's potential exchange program encourages leaving your kid alone for a while at the start of the exchange so they make a smoother transition. If your kid's exchange program just encourages you not to talk to your kid for a year, warning bells should go off.

[preciousjeni]

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that I thought he was eating; I just wonder how much might have been related to his own elective behavior, rather than the restrictions of his host family.

Oh no, I was responding to the story in general.

[Kevlar281]

Maybe it’s easier for me to say this then some but I would be picking food out of a garbage can before I dropped below a 100lbs