Food Stamp Challenge: Reflections

Today I can buy and eat food with reckless abandon again!  Well, not quite, but at least the Food Stamp Challenge is over for my organization.  I am still on a very strict budget, still relying on the Direction card for assistance, but the weight of this challenge has been removed.

The light at the end of the tunnel is something that helps me plow through these challenges (I found this similar to my experiences with the 30 Hour Famine).  To steal a line from A Knights Tale, "Hope guides me. It is what gets me through the day and especially the night."  I only have to do this for a week, and then I'm home free.  I absolutely cannot imagine the psychological weight of living this life (with food insecurity).  The stress day in and day out from thinking about food:  how much you have or don't have, how much you can afford, where your next meal is coming from.  When something is deliberately taken away from you, like your freedom to buy what you want when you want it, that something consumes you.  It seemed to be a fairly common topic in the office this week:  We can't eat normally, so we think about eating a lot.  We can do food stamp challenges, work alongside people and hear their stories, but there is not way to add the most critical piece of the puzzle: hope (or the debilitating lack thereof).  I am so blessed to always have a way out, to have family and friends to fall back on in times of need.

For the people that don't have that support network, who have lost hope, who are burdened daily with food insecurity, I can only keep coming to work.  Life isn't fair, but I believe in making certain parts of life more fair, and attempting to even the playing field one Ohioan at a time.