Today is Blog Action Day 2011 (you can follow the blogging action by following the hash tag #BAD11 on Twitter), and this year the topic is food, since it is World Food Day. At first I wasn't for sure what to talk about, I didn't want to just write whatever my brain told my fingers to type out, I wanted this to have a meaning to it.
I started thinking about to things I've done in the last few years that involved food. I've helped with numerous dinners where we fed at one sit down was over a 150 people. I had also helped do sandwich Saturday a few months ago when we put together small lunch sacks consisting of a dry bologna and cheese sandwich, a banana, a water and cookie to hand out to the homeless of Wichita. And then, I finally remembered Kids Against Hunger.
The mission for Kids Against Hunger is pretty self explanatory on their website: "The mission of Kids Against Hunger, a humanitarian food-aid organization, is to significantly reduce the number of hungry children in the USA and to feed the starving children throughout the world." It doesn't seem like much of a life changing experience to help KAH, but until you've been able to help pack the food you have no idea what the feeling is like.
A few years ago, when I first started attending church on a regular basis with a close family that I had been around for quite a while, our church was hosting a KAH packing day. The food packets that you pack at KAH mainly have rice and seasonings in it but also holds a lot of proteins and vitamins that a lot of kids don't get. On a KAH packing day, you get to experience every part of packing. There's a station where each person gets a specific part of the food pack to put into the package; from there the packs are weighed to a specific weight so the boxes being shipped out are all within the same weight range; after weighing, they're sealed shut and passed on to get tightly packed into boxes and finally get taped up and set into the truck.
Going into that day, I had absolutely no idea what to expect, I had never heard of KAH and from the sounds of some of the people in the congregation it seemed like not very many of us knew what we were doing.
I have to admit though, through the experience I not only learned a lot about the hunger of kids in our own nation, but worldwide, but it changed my perspective of things. I knew that there were kids my age around the world and even kids as close as in my own state; I hadn't the slightest clue of truly how bad it was. If out of anything, I came out of that experience appreciating the fact that I knew I would be coming home from school to a snack and then dinner. That I would wake up and have food for breakfast. And even going to school with the thought of I would have a lunch. I had taken all of these for granted.
Food is one of those necessities in life that I think a lot of people underestimate. We complain about not liking certain vegetables or types of food, but we have the awesome opportunity to have food and we complain about it when there are thousands of people, mostly including children that would be so incredibly happy if they got a portion of food, they don't complain about what they get, they're thankful for what they do get.
Admittedly, I have tried the food packs that KAH make and send out to children around the world a few times. And I didn't particularly like it, but I had to remind myself, I'm used to the luxury of foods that I enjoy.
For more information on KAH or how to help, just visit their website.
I also urge you to check out Blog Action Day and spread the word, it's still not too late to participate this year!
Also, if you want more stuff on World Food Day, check out YouTube's blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment