As summer gets into full swing, most kids are spending their days having fun doing nothing, but for those participating in the Summer Feeding Program, sponsored by Blessings for All Empowered by Faith, learned a valuable lesson – not everyone is as fortunate as they are.
For their mission project, the children “made shoes” by wrapping fabric around the thong of a flip flop and hot gluing them together. Calbrina Woods, founder of Blessings for All Empowered by Faith, told the children that she was contacted to do the project by a group of missionaries who would be traveling the Guatemala.
Woods asked the children how many had shoes.
“How many of you have a pair of shoes on right now?”
Every child hand in the room went up.
“How many of you have two pairs of shoes?”
Their hands went up again.
“How many of you have three pair of shoes?”
Their hands raised again.
“Every person in this room is blessed, we are so blessed. Because there are kids just like you that are your age in Guatemala that don’t have a pair of shoes,” Woods told them.
She explained that they were going to make two pairs of shoes. One pair would be sent to a child in Guatemala and the other pair would be for them to wear.
Even though there are children in Guatemala with no shoes, the children in Winona who participated in the project never “made” the shoes before. It had never dawned on them that someone in another country their age wouldn’t have shoes.
Javarreus Hardiman, 13, said he’d never done a project like the shoe project before. For him it was fun and eye opening.
“I feel good about it,” Hardiman said. “I feel that everyone on earth should be treated the same and have what other people have. It was fun for me, and I loved doing it.”
It was also a way for the children to meet an elected official and members of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department.
Montgomery County Supervisor Willie Earl Townsend and Deputies Calvin Young, R.J. Adell, and Isaiah Smith, along with Haley DeNoon, field educator for Families First of Mississippi were on hand to help.
