If you are like me, you want to help, but feel like you don’t have the time or the money to do so. I think about hungry babies and children and I just ache inside, thinking that there is no reasonable excuse for children to go hungry.
I am appalled when I read about the poverty statistic in the U.S. In 2005:

* 37 million people (12.6%) were in poverty
* 12.9 million (17.8%) children under the age of 18 were in poverty
* 20.5 million (11.3%) of people aged 18-64 were in poverty
* 3.6 million (10.1%) seniors 65 and older were in poverty, an increase from 3.5 million in 2004.
(U.S. Census Bureau. Income, Poverty, and Heath Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005)

The problem seems overwhelming, and the majority of the organizations who claim to help are either making the problem worse by sending money and food to the people in charge in countries where that only makes things worse, or by mishandling the donations. American citizens are largely ignored in the demand for hunger relief. As the richest country in the world, we hide our hungry like a gauche wedding gift from an easily offended family member.

Well, here is something you can do to help. The Hunger Site provides food and resources to America’s Second Harvest, and the MercyCorps.

All you have to do is click on the button and the sponsor will donate food. If you buy something from one of the affiliate websites, they will donate even more food, but since July 2006, over 46 million cups of food have been donated simply by clicking. There are other tabs for sites for breast cancer, literacy, the rainforest, etc.

So click on The Hunger Site button on the sidebar to get to the place you can help with very little time and no money spent.

Like many people I know, I fantasize about what I would do if I won the lottery, or started making an obscene amount of money, etc.

I sit in my warm flannel jammy-pants, drinking my fresh ground coffee, eating my organic granola with organic dried blueberries and soy milk, imagining what life would be like if I were wealthy.

Then I catch a moment from Blue’s Clue’s on t.v. telling me that fully 2/3 of children in America have no age appropriate books at home.

My mind flashes to the hundreds, literally hundreds, of brightly covered volumes in my daughter’s room. So many books that she can’t get through all of them in a year of nightly story-times.

I think about my son’s little bookshelf, already covered in board books and sweet stories just waiting for him to get old enough to enjoy them.

I think about my childhood, when my father built me a bookshelf that went floor to ceiling and covered the whole wall just so most of my books could fit in it. The nightly story from my parents, the books my mom kept excitedly telling me I must read.

Suddenly, I feel obscenely, ostentatiously, ridiculously, rich.