It got a little strange for Adrienne Abrahams when she started dreaming about Skittles.

Not that dreams filled with cascading candy are a bad thing. It's just that Adrienne, 16, was about halfway into a 30-hour juice-only fast - part of a nationwide effort Friday and yesterday to draw attention to world hunger - and you might have thought her gastronomical fantasies would feature more substantive food.

"Then I fell into a vegetable garden, and I was mad," she said, recounting the end of the dream. "I was craving junk food."

Adrienne's sugar-filled vision came to her during a fitful night at Faith Christian Fellowship church in North Baltimore, where Adrienne and two dozen other high school students bunked down on floors as part of the fasting marathon. Later, wide awake, she could hear not only her own stomach growling but that of the girl beside her.

Yet another young lady said she had dreamed about M&Ms.;

Such minor tribulations were a staple of the fast for the youths, some of whom have taken part in the event for several years. None fainted yesterday, although one did three years ago while simultaneously fasting and playing basketball.

"You get used to it," said Tiffany Odum, 16, a three-year veteran of the fasts, referring to the hunger pangs. "Last year I got a headache - you get sick easily. But it's fun. It's a way to get closer to God, and we're helping other people."

Similar fasts were being held yesterday elsewhere in the region - including at Brook Hill United Methodist Church in Frederick, Poplar Springs Charge United Methodist Church in Woodbine and churches in Virginia and Pennsylvania - and around the country. The fasts were sponsored by World Vision, which calls them famines.

Officials at World Vision, a Christian relief organization that helps children tackle poverty and raises money to fight hunger, estimate that a child dies every six seconds because of starvation or hunger-related illnesses. That means, they say, that nearly 18,000 children will have died around the world during the 30 hours of the fast, which was to end at 8:30 p.m. last night.

At Faith Christian Fellowship, a Presbyterian church in the city's Pen Lucy neighborhood, the fasts raised $18,000 for the cause of hunger in the previous four years they were held there. It was not clear how much would be raised this year, because not all the pledges had come in yesterday.

Members of the church were invited to sponsor the youngsters for every hour they fasted. They in turn were urged yesterday to call those sponsors to thank them.

The mood at the church was jovial, partly because the church's minister for youth outreach, Eli Foster, made sure to keep everyone busy with games - dodgeball was a particular favorite - contests, roundtable discussions and skits. The kids were even put to work, collecting trash from streets around the church and playing board games with elderly residents of the Ellerslie Apartments, three blocks away on Wyanoke Avenue. Occasionally, some of the teenagers grew weary, their energy spent, and they flopped onto the nearest chair, or even a church pew. Most slurped on fruit juice at frequent intervals.

Foster acknowledged that the kids in his church faced only minor discomforts in their brief forays into actual hunger.

"There's a huge difference in that they know that at the end of 30 hours their parents are going to fix them a huge meal," he said, referring to the feast in the church's community room that awaited them at the fast's conclusion. "In Chad, or Angola or Niger, kids never know where their food is coming from."

Crystal Abrahams, Adrienne's 17-year-old sister, said she had been so inspired by a documentary about worldwide hunger she and the others were shown on Friday that she planned to write a letter to her congressman about the issue.

"I don't want to be a regular teenager who doesn't do anything," Crystal said. "I want to make a change. I'm blessed that I have the opportunity to help."

The girls' 16-year-old brother, David Abrahams - their father had 13 children - said he, too, wanted to alleviate the scourge of hunger. "Even in jail, you get meals every day," he said. "If I want to get food, I can just go to McDonald's and pay a dollar. In Africa, if they want food, they have to walk three days."

nick.madigan@baltsun.com