'The kids were eating ketchup packets'

Share our strength did a recent survey of the United States and discovered that over 17 million children are at risk of going hungry this year. Whitney Elementary, in Las Vegas, Nevada, is being proactive in order to not allow their students to become part of this statistic. Whitney Elementary is in one of the poorest parts of Las Vegas and nearly 75% of the children attending the school have already experienced homelessness. The school offers several aids to these children including lunches for needy kids, and both a food bank and a clothing pantry run by the school itself. These children can take home food and clothes for their whole family. Having both food in their stomachs and warm clothes on their back has led to a difference in the classroom. The principal announced that during her time at the school the students have doubled their scores on standardized testing. The principal owes this success to the services provided her students and the love they see from the people that help provide these services. I'd never heard of anything like this happening at schools, but apparently it's become more popular over the years and especially during this recession. If you'd like to read the entire article (which you should since it touched my heart), then click on the link below. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/25/nevada.homeless.school/index.html

"Good Jobs, Green Jobs"

In October the Jewish Council for Public Affairs teamed up with Catholic Charities and 34 other national religious organizations to bring attention to those in poverty. Obama promised to create over 5 million new green jobs and these organizations wanted to make sure that the impoverished were not overlooked in the training and hiring of these jobs. "The goal of the Oct.14-21 event is to encourage government officials to make sure the poor don't get left behind in the push to create and develop jobs focused on energy efficiency or environmentally friendly practices in sectors energy, construction and manufacturing." Candy Hill, the senior vice president of Catholic Charities said that, "good jobs are a pathway out of poverty." They called for activists nationwide to encourage lawmakers to "back increased funding for education and training related to the jobs." I'm not sure of the outcome of this week long "push" in favor of those living in poverty. However, it seems that people, nationwide, have recognized the enormous poverty problem and are striving to find a solution. If you'd like to read the article in its entirety, go to http://jta.org/news/article/2009/10/13/1008480/jcpa-works-for-good-jobs-green-jobs

'Tis The Season

As everyone knows, the holidays are coming up. This means gifts, spending time with family, and of course gorging on tasty treats. However, many people don't have this luxury. Many of the organizations here on campus are holding canned food drives to donate to the Brazos Valley Food Bank. Both of the organizations I'm in want members to not only donate, but also volunteer at the food bank around this time of the year because that's when places like these see an increase in people needing meals. There's another place in college station that I had discussed in an earlier post that will be helping out this holiday season with people in need: Twin City Missions. Twin City Missions will be serving a thanksgiving meal on Thanksgiving for anyone who either doesn't have any food or just doesn't have anywhere to go. There are also many churches in the cities of Bryan/College Station that will be hosting Thanksgiving meals. No matter where you live, it's very important to donate either with food, money, or time to places like these to help those that have nowhere to turn during the holiday season. You never know when you could be in their shoes, and I know that if I was, I would hope that someone would help me out. Also, as it gets closer to Christmas, many of these places will be accepting coat donations as well as toys for kids that normally don't get gifts for Christmas. So my message here is to just be thankful for all that you have and help someone else out, give them a reason to be thankful.

Ungrateful

Today I'm just going to gripe about a situation I was in a few weekends ago. I went to Dallas with some friends of mine one weekend in October. We were having a great time and just driving around Dallas. As we were trying to find the restaurant we had reservations for, we drove under a bridge that had a few homeless people laying underneath it. My heart broke for these people. One of my friends looked away in disgust and said she couldn't believe that people would choose to live like that. I was furious with her because how could she say anything that harsh about people she didn't even know. I asked her how she knew that those people chose to be homeless. She stated that anyone who is homeless chose to be that way because they weren't proactive about maintaining a good lifestyle. Anger started to rise up inside of me because of her ignorance. Yes, some people become impoverished and homeless because they do nothing to fix their problems. However, just like any situation, sometimes things are out of our control. These people may have lost their job, couldn't find another one (which is very likely because I have a friend with a college degree that hasn't been able to find a job in a long time), and they may have lost all their possessions because they couldn't afford them. They might have lost their place of residence because they couldn't afford it with no job, and they may not have had anyone to stay with after losing everything. There are so many factors that she chose to ignore. I can't say this for sure, but she probably doesn't realize how hard her parents work to provide everything for her. I bet the homeless people that we saw would love to live my friend's life. She should be more grateful of what she has, because she never knows when it could all be taken away.