“Her friend stood in line for four hours with her two-year-old and her five-year-old to get supplies. When they got to the front of the line, they received one Nutrigrain bar, a can of sausages, and a bag of Skittles. Nothing else, not even water.”
The other morning, I was speaking with a woman at my daughter’s school who recently moved to the area from Puerto Rico. She told me about a conversation she had with a friend who was there that has really been heavy on my mind since.
Her friend stood in line for four hours with her two-year-old and her five-year-old to get supplies. When they got to the front of the line, they received one Nutrigrain bar, a can of sausages, and a bag of Skittles. Nothing else, not even water. Unfortunately, because water is so scarce for them right now, she couldn’t even feed these items to her children because they are all things that make you thirsty. What was she supposed to tell her children when they ate the food and then asked for water?
Later that day, on our drive home from school, my daughter announced she was hungry. She is one of those children who is always hungry. All I could think about after that was the woman in Puerto Rico who is currently struggling to find food and water for her own children as I assured my own daughter that there was plenty of food at home to eat once we got there.
What I am hoping to get readers thinking about however, is their own personal disaster preparation plans, especially for families with small children
I can’t imagine how hard it has to be to have to tell a child that you don’t have food for them. This isn’t only an issue that affects people in storm ravaged areas, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, 7.4% of US households suffer from low food security, and 4.9% suffer from very low food security in 2016. In other words, over ten percent of parents in US households had to tell their children there was no food to eat last year.
I am regularly grateful for the fact that I am able to provide plenty of healthy food for my child, and that I have never had to tell her we don’t have food.
It would be very easy for this to turn into a policy discussion on food stamps and welfare programs, but that was never the intended point of this article. While I would hope that anyone who is reading this who can help the families in Puerto Rico right now, and I would hope that anyone reading this would be supportive of the idea of making sure children in this country do not go to bed hungry at night, I truly feel like supporting aid programs is something you have to do because you want to, not because I told you it is the right thing to do.
What I am hoping to get readers thinking about however, is their own personal disaster preparation plans, especially for families with small children. Are you prepared for a disaster on the scale of the hurricane in Puerto Rico?
The people there need food, water, diapers, first aid equipment, and flashlights with working batteries. Simple things, but due to a variety of reasons those supplies are slow to get to the areas that need them the most. Everyone has their own ideas of how prepared they should be as a family for disasters, but imagine how different the situation would be in areas like Puerto Rico if every home had a bag with these crucial items in a closet somewhere to grab in case of an emergency. A small bag with a headlamp, an extra set of batteries, a water bottle and simple water filtration method, and a first aid kit would prove to be invaluable if the worst-case scenario happened. And it wouldn’t cost very much to put together.
I personally hope that I never have to tell my daughter I don’t have food and water for her, ever. This disaster has me reevaluating our disaster preparation plans and supplies so that I can make sure that I never have to. While I shop for supplies to drop in the box to send to Puerto Rico, I plan to grab a few extras for myself.
Is anyone else doing the same?
