One Child, One Day, One Lunch at a Time

I pack Mr. B and the girls their lunches nearly every morning. Mr. B’s customarily takes a cup of Tillamook yogurt, a piece of fruit, and some kind of leftovers to heat up in the microwave at work.  The girls most often get a “cold lunch”: a sandwich or other hand-held high-protein item, fruit, nuts or a granola bar, maybe some yogurt, and a little treat.  Nothing fancy, but nutritious and hearty enough to get them through the day. 

There are kids in their schools who go hungry though. Each of my five girls, at one time or another, have told me about kids they know who don’t have anything to eat for lunch. Kids they share their lunches with. I don’t understand, what with free lunches being so easy to qualify for and all, how this happens, but on many occasions over the years I’ve packed a child of mine a much more substantial lunch than usual, because I know it will be shared with someone who needs it. I can’t fix the bigger problem of childhood hunger by myself, but I can help one kid for one day.

Personally, I’ve never known real hunger. I did not know, when I was a child, how precariously close our budget balanced on the line. I did not notice, back then, how my mother picked the big pieces of tuna out of our casserole and set them carefully on my plate saying she didn’t want them, or how she made a pot roast last for four or five meals.

I did not know that other people didn’t have chipped beef on rice three or four times a month. Still, First World problems. We always had something to eat. We weren’t rich by American standards, but we were by most of the rest of world’s – there was never a day in my childhood when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from.

Hunger, though, was only a generation away. My father, a Depression era migrant child straight out of The Grapes of Wrath, knew hunger often. He told me with no self-indulgence of many times going to bed without anything to eat, and watching his mother scrape and scrimp and go without to feed her children. He made me understand, as I grew older, just how lucky – how bless – our family was.

Today’s post is all about feeding one child for one day. Or a hundred for a year. It’s your call. Because today my post is dedicated to The Lunch Box Fund. The Lunchbox Fund is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a daily meal for extremely poor and at-risk school children in South Africa.  A country where more than 35% of the population is devastated by poverty and AIDS.  These children, if properly nourished in body and mind, have the potential to change their lives – and their country – for the better.

 

Please consider donating to the current Lunch Box Fund campaign through The Giving Table. Give according to your means. For my part, I am donating $5 per child for each of my own children – I encourage everyone who reads this post to do the same.

Learn more or donate to The Lunch Box Fund here.

Now, I know what you are probably thinking, so I’m just asking – give this PDM sandwich a chance. I like it best with home-canned dills – specifically hot-garlic dills – but Mrs. Neushins Dill Pickles the least salty dill you can find on the shelf will  work in a pinch. 

Interesting story: I had a birth-family reunion about seven years ago.  The first time we got the whole family together, we had a picnic at Multnomah Falls, and it was there that I learned that my first-mom and I share this unusual favorite sandwich.  I mean, really – ask 100 people what their favorite cold sandwich is.  How many do you think will say that it’s PB, Dill pickle & Miracle Whip?  Not many, I guarantee!