Gratitude and a week of corn

Hi all.

I get the opportunity every July to tend to my parents' garden while they are away. Have you ever gardened? It is tough work, and I don't even do any of the tilling, fertilizing, planting, and other prep work that gardens require! All I do is keep it watered and harvest vegetables and fruit when they ripen. Some summers I'll blanch vegetables to prepare them for freezing, and also boil down tomatoes for salsa (which takes a significant amount of time, and at the end of the process, you are left with a far smaller amount of tomato volume then when you started!)

Anyway, on to the point. A few summers back my parents were on a mission trip to Honduras, working with the Chorti people group. The Chorti are direct descendents of the Mayan Indians and the majority of them are subsistence farmers. Remember learning that term in grade school? Many of our ancestors were subsistence farmers--living off the land and barely getting enough to feed their own families some crop seasons.

While my parents were away, the corn was going to ripen. Corn usually ripens all at once and has to be harvested, eaten or blanched then frozen within about a 7 day span of the first corn ear ripening. For my dad's garden, that means more than 100 ears of corn were going to ripen while he was away. The second day of this venture, as I walked to the garden I noticed many stalks down--and it looked like a hurricane or tornado had gone through the corn. The corn had been ravaged by squirrels, and I remember thinking of Adam and Eve and how they lived off the land--and how so many people in our world continue to live off the land and the utter devastation my family would feel if the corn was our only food and our livelihood. For the Chorti, a ruined crop generally means starvation. Several years ago, my church learned of the Chorti and "adopted" them as a people group. Over the last decade, the church has done at least two "food distribution" trips where several individuals fly down to Honduras and begin trekking through the mountainous terrain distributing food when their crops have failed. I am glad my church now knows of this people group's existence---because they still live in a world where a failed crop--be it from bad weather, droughts, animals...means zero food and zero income to buy food.

A few weeks ago I manned the homestead again--and we were in the middle of several weeks without rain. Thankfully, my parents live in a place where we can water the crops with hoses (far easier then hauling individual buckets from a watering hole a mile + away) and provide the corn, broccoli, sweet potatoes, etc; with the much needed hydration for the plants to continue growing and the crops to ripen. I was struck again with how blessed I am with where I live. Had I been a subsistence farmer like the Chorti, like many Sierra Leoneans, and like hundreds of thousands around the globe, this lack of rain would mean I and my family likely would go hungry.

I am grateful for the time I can spend in the garden because the manual labor can be quite rewarding. You get to enjoy the "fruits of your labor." Fresh corn, eaten minutes after it has been picked, is extremely satisfying. As are fresh peaches straight from the tree. But I am even more grateful that I am not a subsistence farmer and that I do not have to depend on the weather cooperating and the animal kingdom leaving my hard work alone just to keep food on the table.

http://freerice.com/
Ever heard of that site? Check it out! For every question you answer correctly, 10 grains of rice gets donated through the World Hunger Programme. It's like Trivia Crack--but instead of competing against friends, you are fighting hunger! :-)