Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Tuesday, March 18

Today, we woke up early around 7 a.m. We all packed into the van and went to the Food Bank of South Carolina called Low Country Food Bank. After talking with the incredibly passionate volunteer organizer, Autumn, we got to work on bagging their most recent shipment of oranges and sweet potatoes. Autumn was really excited about the oranges because they are not usually fortunate enough to receive fresh citrus fruit and she was so happy to be able to distribute that to the needy. This was my first time in a food bank, so it was really incredible that with 13 people we were able to pack hundreds of pounds of food in just 3 hours. It made me really want to seek out the local food bank around UMD and help out there. We also went to see the Heart-Health program at MUSC. This was a special program for overweight and obese children between the ages of 2 and 22. We had a presentation given by the dietician and founder of the program, Janet Carter. It was striking to see the statistics on the prevalence of obesity. One major thing that stuck out to me was when Janet showed pictures of children who were obese, in the 1% of highest BMI and they looked like average children that you would not know were even overweight if you saw them on the street. The program they ran was really incredible and I hope it is successful in order to get more funding and expand to other locations of need in the country. - Daniel

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