A volunteer’s testimony. The “Give a Smile with Warm Food” project.
Four 12th-grade students created and successfully completed the “Give a Smile with Warm Food” project. Here’s what they had to say about the event.
Luke: This has always been a dream of mine. And we finally put together a plan to make it a reality. A team of 4 individuals gathered together to fulfil the goal of sharing a smile through a warm meal. It started off as an idea, just like any project. Feeding people who need a spark of joy to make their day. A quick spoiler: it was much harder than anticipated. We planned everything for 3 weeks, from how we would fund our project, to the meal plans and ingredients, to how we will deliver the food and package it. There were a lot of problems getting in our way. Legal issues with giving food to the homeless, while being under the age of 18, and how long the food can be stored until it goes bad. We needed funding, so I met up with an investor to discuss our vision, and he was willing to give us 500 euros to fund our whole project. It took a while to arrange everything due to legal issues, and I wanted a backup plan, so we raised over 200 euros in 5 days from a bake sale that we hosted. Now we had the funding to at least start. It was getting on my nerves that we weren’t moving forward. So we pushed forward, planning how everything would go. As a team of seven people, we began to notice that some individuals were less motivated to continue, and 3 left, which meant that there were only 4 of us. But that was ok! In the end for our first day we fed 6 people in total, ranging from elderly, to homeless. 6 people is a great start, but what mattered most to me is how we made each person feel. We served them packaged chicken with rice. One of the homeless people was very thankful, which gave me a realization that how hard it must be for the homeless, to not have much to eat, and to freeze on the streets of Bratislava. Just going out for 2 hours was enough for our fingers. Thanks to our interactions, maybe we sparked hope in them. Our goal was to show that there is still good in this world.
Shizhuo: Our charity group gave 6 meals for those people who need help, the idea of this charity was came up by Luke. So we made a bake sell to make money, we made 250 euros, and we started to cook, Randy and I cooked the rice at home, we bought cooked chicken legs from Billa, because it’s easy and high quality. I remember we gave one meal to a disabled mother with a little child, she was so thankful and happy, we were also very happy because we can really help the people who really need help.
It’s nice to know that among our students there are not just proactive guys with an active life position, but also those who are simply not indifferent to people’s problems.
