Most mornings, I begin my day by checking out the Kansas City Star, online. This is a tradition that goes way back to before I discovered the good life here in Northwest Kansas.
I usually am only interested in the sports page, to see the latest news on my beloved Royals and Chiefs. However, I also peruse the front page headlines.
Almost always, the Kansas City Star features a story about violence, or death, or violent death. Murder, rape, molestation, these are what great me in the morning before I click on “Sports.” It makes me all the more glad that I live where I live and that my own paper, our beloved Hill City Times, features good news about blood drives and charity functions, bake sales and ribbon winners. If anybody ever wants to know why a Kansas City boy would chose to live in such a small and isolated place, they need look no farther than the front page of the KC Star.
On Sunday, I was hit not with murder or theft, but with something equally chilling: hunger. The headline read: “Childhood hunger affects thousands in KC area.” According to recent census and department of agriculture statistics, “in the six-county metro area alone, an estimated 100,000 children live in homes where cupboards too often are bare, where the parents may not know where the next meal is coming from. One-third of those children live in extreme conditions where some days they go hungry.”
Imagine. One hundred thousand children who don’t know where there next meal is coming from. And that is just in the KC metro area. One can only imagine the problem nation wide.
I can better deal with the headlines about violence, corruption, and greed. Somehow, they seem more American to me. They are the norm for big cities, and those headlines barely even register. But the idea of children going hungry just doesn’t match my image of the U.S.A.
“I think people have this image of starving African children,” a KC mother of three said in the article. “They don’t see us. They don’t see the kids here in America who are hungry.”
So it got me to thinking about hunger. Everyday I monitor meal times at the grade school. We serve about 60 kids every morning and almost all 200 kids (Pre-K-6) at lunch. While we always insist that the kids take at least one bite of everything, I see a lot of food discarded.
I suppose this is a good thing. Our children are well fed. They are able to push back from the table without having to eat every last scrap because they are confident that there will be food on the table at home, and food tomorrow and the next day.
I thank God that I don’t see kids here in Hill City who are going hungry. To the contrary, some seem to be just a little picky about what they put in their stomachs, my own children included. It reminds me of the old line that some parents used to get their kids to clean their plates, “Finish eating your spinach (or broccoli, or liver, etc.), there are starving kids in China (or Africa, or South America, etc.)”
I don’t like to read about how there are starving kids in America. Of all the horrible headlines I’ve read with my morning cereal, that one really stuck with me.
We are currently running a food drive at the grade school until the end of the week and currently, we haven’t collected very much. So I encourage you to go to the store, or go to your pantries, and find some food to donate to those who don’t have enough to eat. With each item you donate, I hope it will remind you how fortunate we are to live in a place where we aren’t faced with headlines about hunger.
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