While the resolution of the image above is weak, the message it carries is strong. Many children not having enough to eat is a common reality. And it’s not only in some foreign country. Statistics say around 1 in 5 kids in the United States don’t get enough to eat each day. I hate to see adults suffer, but little children doing without food tears at all my emotions from sadness to anger. Have we accepted children going hungry as a fact of life? I can’t and I won’t!
Every day, children in every county in the United States wake up hungry. They go to school hungry. They turn out the lights at night hungry. In high school, Katherine Foronda trained herself not to feel hungry until after the school day had ended. She wasn’t watching her weight or worrying about boys seeing her eat. She just didn’t have any food to eat or any money to buy it. “I thought, if I wasn’t hungry during class I’d be able to actually focus on what we were learning,” said Foronda, now 19.
Early on in high school, with her hunger distracting her from her studies, she failed an English class. Rather than repeating the class, she was given the option of taking an afterschool life skills course, which offered meals to attendees each day and sent them home with food supplies each weekend. She also gained new insight into the possibilities for her own future, learning from a mentor that college was within her reach, despite her family’s economic circumstances.
With food to eat and not just a little bit of hope, she started performing better in classes, and founded a program that offered food support to the student body in her high school. She won a scholarship to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is now a sophomore. http://abcnews.go.com/US/hunger_at_home/hunger-home-american-children-malnourished/story?id=14367230
That’s one of the unfortunate beginnings that now appears to be headed toward a good life story. For many that is not the tale their life will write.
Growing up was not an easy time for my brother and me. Yet comparing our experience to what some go through, we were lucky. The poverty and mental, physical and emotional abuse we grew up in left its scars on us. However, we never lacked for clean clothes to wear, even if unfashionable and ill-fitting; a dry and safe place to sleep, no matter how humble it was; and enough food to eat, even if just basic and cheap sustenance. We were encouraged, even threatened sometimes, to do well in school. All in all the childhood my brother and I experienced made us far ‘richer’ than what many children are going through today.
This will sound a little strange to some, but I am grateful for my childhood. I am mature enough now to see the negative parts and not let them over-shadow the benefits I had. My start may have been rough by some standards, but the essentials for life were there that enabled me to grow into a functional adult who contributes positively to society. The bad seems so much smaller now and the good so much larger.
Hunger of choice is a painful luxury;
hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.
Mike Mullin
Plain and simple, I admire humility. A little thing that happened years ago while checking into a hotel jumps to mind. The lodging was one of those five-star types (Ritz Carlton) where my company meeting was being held and not the type I’d personally pay the price for. Being second in line I was just behind a couple in their late 70s or early 80s. Both were dressed nicely: her with well done hair wearing a simple, but lovely, well fitted dress; him in khaki pants, golf shirt and a navy blue blazer. Their luggage looked well used and was a common brand like American Tourister on Samsonite; not pricey designer bags.
My life is living proof that changing the focus of thoughts can change a life. Worry and compulsion used to be stirred into my thinking most of the time which kept me constantly dealing with a brooding outlook on life. While not immune to feeling such things today, my ‘habit’, even addiction if you will, to negative thinking is no longer.
Each person is unique; a completely original work crafted by intention, deeds, heredity, family, choices, fate and forces beyond understanding. And the path we each choose is one of a kind. There are commonalities, but no exact matches. That is as life as always been.
There is a vitality,
My boyhood memories that are predominately good are those from before the age of seven. Then life was filled with awe, joy and wonder. The painful realities from the adult world had not touched my little brother and me yet.
Response to the post here yesterday, “
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past…
You can’t stop the future
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
Good Morning Gratitude 