Thank You For Our Food

"Give me FIVE!  Give me TEN!  Put your hands together!

God is great. God is good. Thank you for our food.  Amen."

That is how meals are started at my little preschool and daycare center.  Food is provided by the Iowa Food Bank.  This food is not all that nutritionally sound, but it is something.  Children are served Cocoa Puffs and skim milk for breakfast.  A lunch may be white hamburger buns, a chicken type sloppy joe meat, and canned carrots.  Dinner is approximately the same.  Snacks at 10:30 am and 3:00 pm would be jelly sandwiches, or Jiffy peanut butter sandwiches, Ritz crackers, or granola bars depending on the day.  Snacks come with a juice box.  

Even though from my viewpoint, these foods are not very healthy, I do not see overweight kids. 

What I do see is that after about 25, people begin a decline of acquiring an unhealthy body type.  Clear Lake is somewhat of the exception as it has a populace with a bit more affluence and lake activities in the summer lend towards a healthier lifestyle overall.  

I am beginning to wonder if my school has "sick building syndrome."  Of course in the winter, doors and windows are never opened and some days I feel  as if I am swimming in a petrie dish of Legionnaires disease, what with the relentlessly sick kids and toxic chemicals teachers are required to clean with.  Yes.  Teacher's are required to do the heavy janitorial work here. This is all part of what I see as the abuse of workers in an "at will" state.  There is a very caustic floor cleaner that we expose ourselves and the children to daily. We also spray bleach all around while their delicate eyes and little noses are mere feet away.  All this could easily be handled by a professional janitor who understands his exposure, takes the precautionary steps to insure his and others safety.  I do not believe this would be a huge drain on the budget here.  30 hours/week would certainly cover it and the toys could then be sanitized on occasion too.

People are cowed into some sort of silence and desperation here.  People are resigned.  Not everyone, but it has been a long time since I have ever had a job that made me unhappy.  Stressed, yes.  Bringing home the problems and challenges of work in my head? Yes.  But this place makes me happy. 

Unless I get really invested in the place though, I will not worry too heavily about challenging "their norm."  

Today some kids were smashing their granola packs.  I basically said, "Hey, if you don't want them, give them back to me.  There are other kids who are hungry and would want them."  After a derisive snort from one of the boys, I gave them a variation of the, "There are kids starving in Africa, you know." speech.  One boy picked up on that and began to  tell me how his class had raised money for Haiti.  Another child talked about his church raising money to buy some goats for impoverished people so that they would have a source of milk.  It was gratifying. Even though a number of these kids live in what I consider poverty, I still wonder, at times, what poverty looks like. There are still refrigerators, TVs, clothes and shoes, cell phones and toys in all these situations.   We talked about being fortunate in our country in comparison to other parts of the world.

I guess that's all I can ask for right now.  That I can foster a larger view of the world for these kids.  This small town, in the center of the United States isn't all that there is.