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Hi, this is Tony McWilliams, and I’m here with my daughter.
Hi, I’m Lindey Duckworth, and I’m here with my dad.
They lost no children that year, which was the first time in a decade that they hadn’t lost a single child, and they’d been losing 30 to 40 a year up until that point. But then what happened was the word got out from that orphanage to all the other orphanages because they all have a relationship, you know, a network of people, and the word got out, man, get us some of that powder. They even called it magic powder initially, and all it was was nutrition.
That’s kind of how Sam got started in terms of putting together a nonprofit organization that began to send honest-to-goodness nutrition to places that needed it the most, specifically to orphanages and children who are ultra-vulnerable.
Even if you didn’t have a personal connection to the heart of your friends, take them away for a second. This is incredible that this is even on the planet, this kind of love, this kind of business.
Well, immediately I think somebody might jump in and say, well, hey, you know, the United States provides subsidies of, you know, buy the ton of corn and wheat and soy. Matter of fact, when I was first discussing some of this with Sam, that’s what I brought up. I said, you know, hey, I’m imagining some box truck going down the back roads of a dirt road in Africa, and they come across this village where there’s several children with distended stomachs and malnourished and half-naked type of thing, and they pull a powder out of the back of the truck, mix it with water, and they create this soupy cereal type food they pass out to everybody. They’re overjoyed to have it, and I’m explaining this just as I’m explaining it to you right now, and Sam interrupted me and said, don’t get me started.
Wow. And I said, what do you mean don’t get me started? He said, well, we do send food to people. We, as in the United States, you know, programs, subsidies, that sort of thing, but that really is not the answer. Now, do they need something in their stomachs? Yes. But he said it’s not nutrition.
He pointed out, and I looked this up, Doctors Without Borders, which is a nonprofit organization, started saying in 2007 that food is not enough, especially the kind of food we’re giving them. It’s really nothing better than the nutrition-less cereals that you can find in the grocery store shelves in America, except we were sending it over to give to kids who needed it, but it really wasn’t the level of nutrition that they need, so when the big box truck left the village, the nutrition really wasn’t any better in their lives, even though maybe they had a stomach full of subsidies.
Now more than ever, we’re tuned into this. Absolutely. Not just my generation, your generation too, and so I feel like we’re all on a big awareness journey right now.