November 20 (30 hour famine)

I'm so thankful for the ability to provide food for my family.

Loo did a 30 hour famine (a fast) with her school on Friday- Saturday. The purpose was to raise awareness of hunger throughout the world. I was lucky enough to be able to help and participate in the famine.

Here are some interesting facts that I've learned over the past week or so:

• There are something like 26,000 kids under the age of 5, who die each day of preventable causes (starvation being one of them). That's over 9 million kids a year.
• One out of four children - roughly 146 million - in developing countries are underweight.
• 862 million people in the world are chronically hungry.
• The United States produces enough food to feed the whole world.

Some of the activities we did as part of the famine was a food drive. (the families in the school donated 5400 lbs of food to the local pantry!) We made blankets for abused and neglected children, collected hygiene items*, and we also did an Amazing Race type of activity. The kids had to go figure out how to earn $10 and then spend the money doing some act of kindness. Our group chose to panhandle (which was allowed) and they earned $29. They decided to take the money and buy food at McDonald's and then pass it out to some of the homeless people downtown. I was really proud of my group. The last activity was a race. I explained that if we went downtown to do our deed, then we most likely wouldn't win, and they didn't care. They said "this whole thing is about service, we don't' care if we don't win".

Anyway, I hope I don't sound like I'm bragging. That's certainly not what I'm trying to do. I just left there feeling so incredibly grateful to have food and other resources in abundance. What a fantastic way to start off the holiday season! What better way to show thanks-giving, than by helping others.

I am so blessed!

*apparently the pantries (and I would imagine the food banks as well) are also in need of things like deodorant, shampoo, laundry detergent, soap, toilet paper, etc. So, if you have some you could share, they would love it! Most of the time when people think about a pantry, they don't consider necessities like those. Could you imagine not having toilet paper or soap?

And one more thing that I learned today, the food bank can also use cash donations. They have a much larger buying power than us consumers, so by us giving a monetary donation, they can actually do more with it than we can. (not sure about the pantries though)