Part One
This week I'm featuring a friend of mine, Jimmy Chalmers; highlighting the experience he had this summer when he saw a need and said, "This one's up to me."
Jimmy lives in NC with his wonderful family. He is the pastor of a church called The Carpenter's Shop, a contractor and a beekeeper. I'm enjoying a jar of his honey these days in my morning tea and it's every bit as wonderful as he is.
Jimmy, tell us about what happened to you this summer?
This past spring I attended a one-day conference, attempting to
synthesize food, faith and farming in the lifestyles of local churches.
One of the speakers was Jill Stanton Bullard. She is the founder of
the Inter Faith Food Shuttle here in central NC. During her speech
she started to give the statistics for children, especially those who
are involved in the school breakfast and lunch programs in this area.
In approximately 8-9 counties in this region there are way over 50,000
kids who are involved in the school breakfast and lunch program. My
first question as a fiscal conservative was "how many people are
scamming the system?" I began to put a mental pencil on the
mathematical equation. I finally settled on what is a pretty high
number – 50%. So if 50% of the kids involved in the program are
scamming the system, that means that 50% are not. 50% of the children
who go to school in this region everyday are dependent on the school
breakfast and lunch program for a percentage of their daily
nourishment. That means that 10s of thousands of children in one of
the wealthiest regions in our nation need the schools to provide them
one or more meals a day.
After checking the numbers, I found several
thousand kids in Granville County use this program. That means that
five days a week, during the school year, these children have an
opportunity for a nutritious meal. What about the weekends, holidays
and the 12 weeks during the summer? After coming home from that
conference and I had a conversation with my wife and children. We
suddenly saw a large need in our community that needed someone to step
in and take care of it.
Several days later, I contacted Mr. Xavier
Wortham from the Oxford Housing Authority. I asked him one simple
question … "do you have hungry children in your apartment communities?"
He gave me a very simple, shocking answer.
"Yes".
Once I knew that
we definitely had hungry kids and a contact within a community that we
could help, it was then I went to our faith community and told them
what I'd learned. We began to put together a plan of
how we could feed children during the summer break. Xavier explained
that during the summer he already has set up a reading program. This
program has children in the community who need and want help learning
how to read and there was great opportunity to dovetail bag lunches
into his program.
So, after some prayerful consideration and concern
we decided as a congregation that we would be responsible to prepare
lunches for 24 children, 5 days a week during the summer break. We did
not have any idea how much food it would take, how much time and energy
it would require, but we truly believed that the compassion of Jesus
compelled us to do something.
We started off with $100, asking our
congregation and other people of faith to contribute food or cash to
help us feed these 24 kids.
So early summer our kitchen was
transformed every morning into a bagged lunch assembly line. Everyday,
24 sandwiches were made … peanut butter and jelly, cheese, bologna,
lunchmeat. All those sandwiches were then placed in sandwich bags.
Those sandwich bags were then placed in a brown lunch sack. Each sack
would then receive a piece of fruit (apples, bananas, fruit cups,
applesauce). We always made sure that there was a juice box to go with
their lunch as well as a sweet snack or salty treat. We truly wished
that we could have prepared these fancy, nutritious gourmet lunches,
but we also knew that we didn't have the facilities or the resources to
make that happen.
Our first goal was to make sure that little bellies
had a lunch five days a week. The 24 lunches then had to be
transported to the community center in downtown Oxford, where tutors
were working with these children on their essential reading skills. At
the end of the class as they went home, they would each be handed a bag
lunch.
There were some weeks, at the beginning of the week, that we
didn't have the funding or the resources to make 120+ lunches for the
week, so we would purchase the items out of our family budget, but each
and every time during the week someone would send us a check or hand us
cash or drive across the county with items they just purchased. By the
end of the summer, we took the "leftovers" to the community center (6
bags of juice boxes and peanut butter and jelly).
After the summer,
Xavier contacted us and told us that this had been the most successful
reading program he had ever had and he was thankful to us for helping
him with the more than 40 kids that were involved in the program. That
was when we realized that he had more than 24 involved in his reading
program. To us that meant more than 16 kids went home everyday without
lunch. So, now we are trying to figure out how to feed all the kids
involved in the summer reading program for 2008. We don't have the
slightest idea how we are going to do it!
Put Jimmy and his family on your prayer list, won't you?
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