Put Your Fork Down And Help Someone

I participated in my company's annual Community Day event yesterday by working at the North Texas Food Bank. What they do there is amazing, and I am always glad that I chose to work there. Yesterday I worked on a project called Food For Kids. It's a program that encourages teachers to identify children who come to school on Mondays exhibiting signs of starvation. (These kiddos aren't getting any meals on the weekends.) So each Friday, the Food Bank brings bags of food tucked into backpacks for these kids. These bags have juice boxes, fruit roll-ups, fruit, peanuts, cereal, etc, in them. It's all stuff these kids can eat without help or utensils or cooking. The real tearful moment for me was when the woman from NTFB told us one teacher recently identified a student for this program who was so hungry he was eating the paper off of his crayon. This, needless to say, brought me to tears. And I can hardly retell the story without crying. How is it that, even in these economic times, we have children going without food? We have so many people who have the resources to help and just don't. Maybe because they don't know about stories like this one. I didn't until yesterday. But David and I have vowed to start doing more. What I don't have is lots of extra time, but I do have some extra money to donate. The NTFB says that for every $1 donated, 5 meals are able to be provided. That's a lot of meals for a little money. And it's not just the Food For Kids program...some food goes to the Houston Food Bank to help hurricane victims. Some will go to the Salvation Army, church food pantries, and various other places where food and meals are needed.

I am achy and sore today from all the work I did yesterday, but each ache and pain reminds me that because of what 79 of my coworkers and I did, 40,000 meals are going to be delivered to people who need them. I can feel good about that!