Going hungry - for six years

Every day for six years Naomi Grace went to school hungry.

"I'd look at everyone else's food and I'd cry to myself – I'd go into the bathroom and cry because I didn't have that," she says. "We only had flour and eggs in our cupboards; from when I was six until I was 12 I was going to school hungry."

At times she got so desperate she would collect leaves, sticks and nuts which she'd take to the school tuck shop in exchange for food: "I thought they might be able to make something with them and on a good day I'd get a pie or a sausage roll."

This is not the tale of the victim of a war-torn combat zone or a drought-ravaged corner of the world: It is the story of a normal New Zealand schoolgirl living in Rotorua and, later, Auckland.

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