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November 9, 2009
And What Are You Having For Dinner Tonight?
Tools That Can Change Your Life:
It’s Thursday afternoon and I just returned from the warehouse at The Hunger Coalition. The Hunger Coalition strives to end hunger in our community by providing wholesome food to those in need and by promoting solutions to the underlying causes of hunger through collaboration, education and advocacy.
Recently, The Hunger Coalition initiated its latest program to fight childhood hunger - the Backpack Club. In order to feed hungry students over the weekends, donated backpacks are filled with shelf-stable, child-friendly and easy to prepare foods that children can bring home to prepare for themselves and their siblings. Statistics on Hunger Coalition website state that there are 450 children in our county who live in poverty. If they are living in poverty, they must go hungry. 2,716 backpacks were handed out in the 2008-2009 school year! Feedback from students, teachers and parents has been overwhelmingly positive. The social workers have expressed how grateful the kids are to receive the packs, commenting how students act as if it’s Christmas each Friday.
I am a member of one of two teams that alternate weeks to fill these backpacks. We all arrive at 330 in the afternoon and each takes on a self-appointed duty, yet still working as a team. First we identify the menu, as it varies slightly from time to time and from age category. The boxes are slit opened and stacked; Campbells soup, macaroni and cheese, applesauce, juices, soy milk, granola packets, cereals, tuna, fruit cups, Ritz crackers are some of the staples. Albertsons Market chain supplies us with bags that act as “backpacks” for the younger children.
This week team number two had 102 backpacks to fill, which means that this week there were 102 children that would not go hungry this weekend because of these donations. I broke down the boxes for recycling, separated the bags to be filled, kept watch over the trash and prepared a few packs. Another person made certain their were the proper numbers of bags indicated for each school. Were are a team of five people working smoothly and in sync, and we finished our job in about 1 1/2 hour. I hadn’t had lunch this particular Thursday and my stomach was growling periodically, which made me aware of just how many children go hungry, never having those pangs satisfied.
From www.hungernotes.com: “7.7 percent of U.S. households are at risk of hunger. Members of these households have lower quality diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need. 26.6 million people, including 10.3 million children, live in these homes.”
From a site about hungry children in Idaho:
- Persistent hunger interferes with normal child development and makes it difficult to concentrate in school.
- Hungry children suffer two to four times as many health problems as other children, including anemia and vitamin deficiencies. (Dr. Christine Vladimiroff)
- They are more than twice as likely to have frequent headaches, ear infections and colds. Hungry children are also three times as likely to miss school. (Tufts University’s Center on Hunger and Poverty)
- They are also more likely to be sent to a school psychologist and develop cognitive problems, especially if they're undernourished in their first three years, when the brain reaches 80 percent to 90 percent of its adult size. (Dr. Anne Terry, Oregon Health & Science University)
- In an experiment, poor children who got free breakfast at school gained about three percentile points on standardized tests compared to children who were eligible but did not participate in the food program. (New York Times)
Hungry children is America; the land of plenty, the land of opportunity, the land of milk and honey. Hard to believe but every time I fulfill my service commitment at The Hunger Coalition, I get that it’s true. I ask myself,
how can this be? What are our priorities? What choices are we making?
Do you have a backpack club in your community? How many children go hungry in the state in which you live? I urge you to become aware, be informed and take action.
Affirmation
I release any false ideas that keep me separate and lacking the wisdom that I am connected to everyone. This truth opens the channels for me to be of service to humankind.
Quote:
Every gun that's made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Dwight David Eisenhower
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