Ketchup Packets
Posted by Alice Pennington on Thursday, June 24, 2010
Share Our Strength is sending a team on the road to visit summer meals sites we’ve funded throughout the country and to interview community leaders and Share Our Strength partners who fill the critical role of making sure hungry kids receive healthy meals while school is out. We hope you enjoy this first installment in the series of posts from the road.
Last Monday my colleague, Katherine Campbell, and I traveled to the Boys & Girls Club of El Dorado, in southern Arkansas as the first stop on a trip through the rural South to visit summer meals programs funded by Share Our Strength. The poverty and hunger we witnessed was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, and it made me want to work even harder on behalf of the hundreds of kids we met. Their faces are ingrained in my mind and will motivate me for years to come.
In El Dorado, over 61 percent of kids in the community qualify for free/reduced school lunches. The state of Arkansas is ranked third in the nation in food insecurity. And more than 80 percent of the kids that visit the Boys & Girls Club of El Dorado during the summer are from low income families.
The recession has never felt more real to me than it did in El Dorado where empty factories and plants line a haunted stretch once called “Industry Row.” In response to the growing need, the Boys & Girls Club started a “take home sack program,” which provides meals for kids in the evenings. Their program is one of the few examples of an evening meals program run in the summertime. The staff started it because they knew their kids weren’t eating at home. Now many kids receive three meals a day and literally all of their food from the Club.
We heard one story about a child caught stuffing ketchup packets into his pockets while he was helping clean up after a staff meeting. When his teacher asked him what he was doing, he said he was saving them to make tomato soup with his grandma. The story shocked me, not just because of the sadness of making dinner out of ketchup packets, but because it demonstrated such a clear awareness on the child’s part that he wouldn’t eat otherwise. Trying to find food had become second nature to him.
This is only one of many stories that proved how absolutely critical the El Dorado Boys & Girls Club summer meals program is in the lives of these kids.
June 24, 2010 | 1 comment(s) | Tags: No Kid Hungry, summer meals
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1 reader comment so far.
Bringing these stories to life is so important to understanding that there are many hungry children in America. Thank you for visiting parts of our country often over looked.
Posted by cathy pennington on June 24, 2010
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