Waking up
Today’s blog is from a student who participated in a packing event at her school this spring
When we were in the auditorium, we were laughing, telling jokes, and arguing over small things, like many teens in the U.S. do. We made fun of hardships and grief. We thought the world was a joke, and many of us still do, but Servants With a Heart has helped us wake up a bit.
To be in America right now—a first-world country—and be able to afford food and housing is a blessing. We have everything we need. We get upset when we don’t like the food that we get and just ignore the fact that we have food. Since we are so blessed, we don’t realize the realities of the world, and everything seems funny to us.
But we all fell quiet when we saw kids—our age, same eyes, same ears, same heart, struggling to survive. They were malnourished and needed food to protect them from health problems later on in life. Being malnourished can affect people’s development by increasing the risk of physical and psychological problems. We saw how blessed we were to have food on the table every day. We saw that people in the world are facing difficulties we couldn’t even imagine. Before, we just heard that we were blessed, but now, we see what people really meant when they said that.
When we went to pack the food, we saw that we had to try to get as many nutrients into the food as we could. We packed rice and dried vegetables, soy and vitamin/mineral powder. We saw that the amount of food we packed into the bag would represent just one to two normal meals for us. The bag was meant to feed six people. They didn’t have the luxury to choose what they got to eat, they just had to get enough food.
Servants With a Heart motivated us to help people in any way we can, to recognize problems, and work to find ways to fix them. They are helping people get what they need. What we did that day might have helped many, many kids. They opened our eyes to problems around the world, so maybe, one day, we can help fix them. Servants With a Heart helped wake us up.
