While listening to Tricia Goff and Cecelia Richards speak to members of the Rotary Club of Picayune Tuesday and the work they put in towards helping children who live in low-income homes, I wondered what it would like to go hungry over the weekend. Many of these children don’t eat over the weekend, not because they choose not to do so but because their parents can’t financially afford to feed them.

Goff and Richards represented the Bacpac Ministry program. This program focuses on providing food items to kids in need who attend local elementary schools in Pearl River County.

People who help with Bacpac Ministry fill a backpack with food and basic items and take them to elementary schools. Once delivered, school officials distribute the backpacks to children in need so they can have multiple meals over the during the weekend.

Usually when I think of kids and/or families not being able to eat because of financial reasons, I think of families who live in other parts of the world. These kinds of stories show up in news broadcasts every now and then but since they always take place somewhere else we never stop to think that this is an issue that affects children in our community

According to an article from the Huffington Post from 2016, a report from the Food Research and Action Center stated 19.2 percent of households with children struggled to purchase food at one point during the year across the United States. The report also stated Washington D.C. and Mississippi had the highest hunger rates among families with children.

Many of us may have never encountered the problem of not knowing when or where our next meal was going to come from, so let’s help children in our community not have to worry about it as well.