True Life: Free Rice for you!

I heard about this website called FreeRice.com. Supposedly, it is a site that one can go to and play a game and somehow people in third-world countries will get rice to eat. I heard about it from a facebook group (ah, facebook is doing their job to change the world). I thought that it was probably too good to be true. I did some more research on the FreeRice craze and this is what I found:

First of all, it was a website stared by John Breen, a computer programmer from Indiana. He made other websites such as: TheHungerSite and Poverty.com. He thought it would be a good idea to make a vocabulary game into something that helps fight hunger. He came up with Freerice.com. The program has advertisers like: Sirius satellite radio, American Express, Shutterfly, Mikasa, Enterprise, and more. The advertisers donate money for every question people answer correctly to the United Nations World Food Program (UNWFP). The UNWFP then buys rice and distributes it to third-world countries. The site also says that they try to buy the rice from their third-world markets whenever possible in order to help their local economy. The site explains: "when you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated."

The site was launched on October 7, 2007 and after the first month they have claimed to have donated enough money for over 14 metric tons of rice. As of yesterday (Dec. 30, 2007) the site claims to have donated 12,139,325,970 grains of rice.

I don't want to bore you by going into too much detail but as far as I can tell it is a worthy cause. Please comment and let me know if any of you find information otherwise.