Feed My Starving Children

Last week (March 22 from 8-10pm), I volunteered with Feed My Starving Children with my family and boyfriend. We packed food to send to starving children in Africa. Our specific load went to Haiti. Basically, after a short introduction, twenty to thirty people work in stations in this warehouse to pack rice, soy, veggies, and vitamins in sealed bags to feed children in schools, orphanages, poor villages in nearly 70 countries. It was set up like an assembly line, so I held and sealed bags the whole time with my uncle, while the rest of our group measured and shoveled in the ingredients. Time flew by very quickly, because the work was easy and repetitive, and the people near by were fun to talk with.

At the end of the session, all the volunteers that night packed 64 boxes total, enough for 13,824 meals to feed 37 kids for a year. In the introduction and the wrap up, we were shown educational videos about the charity and the starving children it helps. 18,000 children a day die from hunger. The statistics are heartbreaking, especially given that there is more than enough food produced in the world to feed everyone. The one positive thing I learned was that since the inception of Feed My Starving Children, less and less children are dying daily of starvation. I felt proud to be a part of a cause that saves so many lives, and surprised that only two hours of my time could do such a thing. I plan to go back for the rest of my community service hours as well.

My boyfriend and I in our sexy hairnets lol:

Feed My Starving Children
1072 National Parkway
Schaumburg IL 60173
Contact Jan at 763-951-7306

Culture Shock and Spongebob Squarepants

One of my favorite Spongebob episodes is when he accidentally takes the bus to Rock Bottom on his way home from glove world. It also was one of the scariest (a long with the Hash Slinging Slasher episode). As hilarious and frightening as the episode is, it's very relatable to culture and sociology especially to the terms culture shock, ethnocentrism, and cultural relativity.

Basically, what happens is Spongebob finds him self lost in Rock Bottom, where life is completely different from what he knows. Everything is dark, people look and speak strangely, and Spongebob can't even read the bathroom signs. When he first arrives, he experiences culture shock, meaning he is overwhelmed and confused about the culture of Rock Bottom. He gets scared and paranoid because everything is so different to him. He also feels a sense of ethnocentrism because he feels the the life down in Rock Bottom is wrong. The buses run at an unusually evasive time, and people spit while they talk to him, and because Songebob's culture doesn't follow these customs, he believes everyone else is wrong, which makes him afraid. At the end of the episode, however, a Rock Bottom citizen that Spongebob feared the whole time, ended up helping him float back home in his Glove World balloon. In this scene, Spongebob becomes more culturally relative, understanding that while the culture in Rock Bottom might be different than his, it isn't wrong or right, it's just different.