Day 1 of D-Term: We are going to mobile loaves and fishes. We are helping them with organizing their trucks by sorting clothes, and loading and packaging food.

Mobile loaves and fishes is an Austin based, non-profit organization that brings healthy, free food to low-income areas and neighborhoods.  Their motto is, “"We provide food and clothing, and promote dignity, to our homeless brothers and sisters in need."  They have served an estimated 2,785,920 meals, and they have had around 16,285 volunteers that do everything from preparing the meals, to driving the food truck and serving the people.  It was started in September of 1998 by Alan Graham, and has been growing ever since.  Mobile loaves and fishes also provides soaps and dental utensils because hygiene is also another big issue concerning poverty.

Lack of hygiene leads to a greater risk of acquiring diseases like diarrhea, which causes an estimated 1.8 million deaths a year in children.  People living in poverty can’t afford hygiene supplies and clean water in which to bathe.  Around 660 million people in the world live without proper sanitation facilities.   Another 1.1 billion people live without access to clean, safe water.  These people are more susceptible to catching diseases.  Also, it is hard to get, and to keep a job if one has nowhere to get clean.  Even though this issue is widespread and large, there are organizations trying to tackle this problem.

- Nick Goldreyer

 

Day 2 of D-Term: We are going to Caritas.

Caritas is a non-profit organization that provides food for people in poverty, but also collects hygiene items such as soap, toothbrushes, and toothpaste.  Caritas then gives out these items during their meal times.  Hygiene items are high up on the list of donation items to the organization because they know how important these things are. Lots of other food organizations also do this, but there are currently no organizations in Austin that focus on this.  The topic of hygiene ties into my next topic of water.

Not having clean, safe water to drink and wash with can lead to disease caused by parasites, viruses, and bacteria.  People living in poverty sometimes can’t afford or don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.  One out of six people in the world have no access to safe drinking water, and more people die in the world because of unsafe drinking water, than in war.  Even though this is happening all over the world, most of it is happening in developing third world countries.  There are still people in Austin that aren’t getting access to clean water, and there are organizations trying to help with that.

-Nick Goldreyer

 

 

Some facts of disorders that can physically harm you:

1. Anorexia:
Anorexia is a disease that makes people want to starve themselves. There are many symptoms that can lead you to think you have anorexia these symptoms consist of consistent loss of weight, poor/no appetite, hair loss and organ failure.

2. Obeseity:
Obesity, however is almost the exact opposite Anorexia, people with an Obesity problem eat too much and exercise very little. People with an Obesity problem are usually over weight and can have many problems with their health that could be fatal.
3. Sleep:
Although for many people especially teenagers getting sleep is the lowest priority on their list of things to do, it is the highest demand. Not getting the right amount of sleep can lead to things such as sickness, very low energy, gain/loss of weight and dizziness. Lack of sleep can also cause things such as car accidents. The average amount of sleep for:

4. Bulimia:
Bulimia is a harmful disease both physically and mentally. When someone is Bulimic they eat large amounts of food and then get rid of it somehow, mainly by throwing up. The types of food that a Bulimic person will consume can be even more harmful than throwing up, which by itself causes much harm to the stomach. These foods include food that is not cooked or might be still frozen, or they may retrieve food from the trash.

-Jules Epstein

Some interesting facts:

Exercise:
The amount of exercise that a teen is supposed to get a day to be healthy is 60 min. About 19.6 percent of kids ages 6-11 are not getting the right amount of exercise and 18.1 percent of teens 12-19 are overweight.

-Jules Epstein

DTerm Articles:

Organizations:

Central Texas Food Rescue is an organization that helps collect and assist people with fresh foods such as fruit, vegetables, dairy products and meat. They handle large amounts of perishable food and quickly distribute it to someone in need. They collect this food from area grocers and wholesalers and distribute them throughout their service area in Central Texas. In 2008, CTFR brought 1.6 million pounds of food and in 2009, they brought 3.3 million pounds of food. They hope this number will increase in the next few years so that they can get for food to more families.

    Any Baby Can of Austin is an organization that helps improve the lives of children. They help them with education and deepening their relationship with their families. The children they work with include children facing many difficult challenges in their life, including poverty. This organization supports the families with both prevention and intervention strategies. This agency provides a center for family literacy, tutoring, parenting education and childbirth classes. Everything they do is meant to strengthen the lives of children now and in the future.
   

Seton Healthcare Family is a non-profit organization that provides health care services to all children in need through Dell Children’s and other hospitals in Austin. They are the leading provider of health care services in Central Texas. It contributed over four-hundred thirteen million dollars to care for the poor last year. Seton’s hospitals, health care centers and clinics provide many different levels of diagnosis, treatments and rehabilitation services. This organization gives hope for a happier, healthier life to people living in poverty.

     Issues and Solutions:

Physical exercising plays a great role in contriving healthy bodies, it relieves your stress, reduces risks of having diseases and improves you physically and mentally. Imagine after a busy day of work and you just came back from school, if you start playing video games, you are basically adding stress and tension to your body because your hands tend to tighten up in some point of the game without your acknowledgement, thus stimulating your nerves and causing decrease in beta waves, causing you to overuse your prefrontal brain which correlates with aggressive behaviors. We have to ask ourselves, WHAT’S THE POINT OF PLAYING VIDEO GAMES IF IT DOESN’T DO ANY GOOD TO YOU??? If we, oppositely, spend the time we used on playing video games on exercising, it helps pump up the production of your brain’s ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter and it helps you forget the irritations and concentrate only on your body’s physical movement.
   

   Another imminent issue in society is obesity. You gain weight when you take more calories than you burn off. Obesity can evoke a lot of health problems like high blood pressure and diabetes type 2 which could lead to baleful consequences like higher possibility to experience heart attacks and strokes for high blood pressure patients while diabetes type 2 can incite amputation, blindness and at worst, death. According to multiple researches, exercising is the perfect method to avoid or mollify obesity. Physical workouts or exercises help strengthen the heart muscle, elevating HDL and lowering LDL, moreover boasting the rate of burning calories.
 

      Children nowadays eat a lot of junk food like chips, French fries, soft drinks, fruit roll-ups etc. But they never consider the consequences of such actions. When you eat junk food, you displace more nutritious food from your diet. Chips, for example, contain ingredients like BHT (Butylhydroxytoluene) which is a used by multiple food industries to prevent rancidity and could cause cancer if amply consumed, and trans fat which increases potentiality of heart diseases by clogging arteries and thereby increasing total cholesterol levels and reducing HDL in your bloodstream. Therefore, we should always be frugal in what we eat.
 

       To a lot of people, sleeping seems to be a complete waste of time. Most people don’t realize how much sleep they need and conceive the importance of sleeping. Sleep is the time when your body does most of its repairment and improvements to your body, like rebuilding and restoring your muscle tissues, and it restores the body’s energy which has most been depleted through the course of the day. Here is a quote from a doctor who works in the Sleep Disorders Center at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical center in New York City, “Think of the body as a car. No car can keep going and going and going without a tune-up or oil change. If it’s not tuned, the car may keep running, but not as smoothly as it did when it was maintained properly. You can think of sleep as your body’s daily tune-up.” Sleep likewise plays a vital role in promoting physical health, longevity and stability in emotions. If we don’t get adequate sleep, it may affect our personality, our tolerance towards others and our sense of humor. Lack of sleep clearly affects our alacrity in processing things we encounter because the brain’s engine hasn’t been fully replendished. Therefore, we all should get enough sleep in order to be ready for the day which lies ahead.
 
       Last but not least, I am going to talk a little bit about mental health. Mental health can directly affect your physical health because people who have strong and healthy emotional health tend to be aware of their thoughts, feelings and behaviors and therefore would be abstemious on what they do. Nevertheless, for example, a problem that everyone faces, if a loved one died, it afflicts you mentally and directly, and you would probably find a way to express your grieve and force yourself to do something that you would unlikely do on regular basis like drinking or becoming gluttonous which would affect you physically. In other words, your body responds to the way you think and act.
       To conclude, in order to live a healthy and substantial life, we must maintain a healthy lifestyle which is to preserve the stability in both mental and physical health; Do daily exercises and keep track of your workouts and records, stay away from drugs and alcohols, be sagacious in the choice of nutritious food, always be positive, and most importantly, live a happy and fruitful life.

Self-Reflection (Day 1):

       Our group went to Mobile Loaves and Fishes.  We got the chance to help out our community by helping load the trucks and organizing the items in them such as books, clothing and food. We also cleaned farm fresh eggs and put them into their cartons to be delivered to the homeless. The place where we volunteered was a small building filled with daily necessities and supplies including clothing, canned foods, eggs, toys, and other things that people had donated.

We were working very effectively as a team throughout this experience  and got  a lot of work done in a less amount of time. We had a whale of a time and felt good  knowing that we were helping people in need. We also got an opportunity to work with people who go there everyday and really care about our community. Seeing how little things could have a huge impact on other people and ameliorate their lives.Given finishing our jobs in a short span of time, we were then taken to Amy’s ice-cream!

    Self-Reflection(Day 2):The other day, Gena VanOsselaer from Ripples of Hope came to talk to us about child education before we went and did our last D-Term volunteering.  She depicted that a lot of children in Austin do not have a good education because their parents do not earn enough income to afford the school fees  and may not have the resources to send their kids to school. And that’s exactly what her organization does. People fund and donate money into the organization and they diverted it into kids that do not receive a simple and basic education. She read us letters from kids that are big aspirants but are held back by the fact that they are living in poverty.
  

  That day, we went and put together bags for the homeless at Caritas, which means “love” in Latin. We didn’t get a chance to actually interact with the people there, but right outside the place was a homeless man who asked as more one of the toothbrushes that we were carrying. We got a lot done at the organization and we really felt like we made an impact on people.  These past two days have not only opened our eyes to what a lot of people go through every day, but also taught us how to work together in order to make a difference in our community.

- Paige Lawrence and Justin Leung