Last week we wrapped up our seventeenth week of The Breakfast Club, and as of last Friday, Thida–with very minimal help from us–has served up 3,070 meals to kids in this community.
3,070!
That is so much rice I can’t even wrap my head around it, even after buying it and lugging it home from the market each week!
Thida is an incredible gift. She is a chef, server, leader, mom, grandma, and friend to each and every child, mom and dad that comes to the door. She understands the power of a steady, healthy meal in the unsteady, unhealthy lives of these kids. She gets why some are served free and some not. She gets why it’s hard to draw lines in the sand. She gets the value of it and the challenge of it; and she’s taking it on day after day with excellence.
And she’s become one of my best friends, in many ways through this endeavor. While we’ve shared the responsibility of early mornings and market trips and planning for feeding, that isn’t what brought us closer. It has been sharing the pain of the poverty of this community.
They ask her for loans, too, and she has to figure out what to do. They tell her their pains and ailments and worries, and she has to find words, too. She has unknowns in her future, too. She has become a confidant on how to handle difficult situations, what to say (in theory and in actual vocabulary!), what to hope for, and what to pray for. I don’t know exactly what she believes, but I know we’re having regular conversations about our prayers and hopes.
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Last week as two of the bread ladies came in to bake, they dropped their kids at the door for breakfast & came into the kitchen. As they looked back at the large group of kids gathered around our Thanksgiving leftovers, one of them asked, “Do you just like feeding the kids? Are you happy?”
You see, while Thida gets it, most of the community doesn’t. It’s weird that we serve breakfast for free, only to the kids, and only to the skinny ones. It’s weird that we pour in loads of meat and eggs and pumpkins and beans. It’s weird.
But I was a little confused at her question. Am I happy…today? Am I happy to feed them Thanksgiving food? Am I happy…for what?
And once I understood, I tried to explain. This is in short what I attempted to say in Burmese: Well, yes, it does make me happy to see them eating good food. But, that’s not why we do this. We knew many of the kids were too skinny and not getting enough food. So we told our church about it, and asked if they would help us feed the kids breakfast. We thought about 50 of the kids would be “too skinny.” Now, it’s more than that, so sometimes I get nervous we won’t have enough money to feed everyone. But, I think it’s really important. If they eat enough food and eat healthy food, they will be smarter. When they get older, I think this will help their lives be easier.
Easier? They asked.
Both of them have recently been in very hard seasons, and we’ve been helping them out. So I felt comfortable to say: I see how hard life is for you. It’s hard to get work, it’s hard to live, it’s hard to live here without papers, it’s hard to have enough money. I hope that if you’re kids eat healthy, life will be easier for them than it is for you.
And while this isn’t the first time we’ve explained The Breakfast Club–maybe more like the one thousandth time?–they seemed to see it. Three thousand meals in, and maybe a couple moms looked me in the eye and got it: it’s a long-term plan.
And it’s enough of a plan we think it’s worth getting up at 5am for. It’s enough of a plan we are going to measure all your kids and put them into a system and keep track of their growth. It’s enough of a plan for us to go to the market every week and buy insane amounts of food. It’s a plan, and it’s working.
We’re 3,070 meals in, folks!
LOVE 😉