Two Great Thanksgiving Ideas

If you haven’t made your Thanksgiving plans yet, let me give you a great idea to try with your family and friends: Thanksgiving Brunch! A few years ago, the Mrs. and I started hosting friends and family at 10 a.m. on Thanksgiving for coffee, ham, and eggs, and I love it!  So much less pressure … no guilt about not wanting to cook or eat a turkey … a huge afternoon nap at halftime of the Lions’ game, and our kids and extended family members don’t have conflicts to contend with. Trust me on this one: Thanksgiving brunch is where it’s at. It’s a thing.

If you and your family want to do something special this Thanksgiving, let me give you one more idea: give a gift to help people who don’t have enough food. We’ve been surveying our communities for four years, asking questions like, “I have gone hungry so that a child could eat.”

A superstar research economist named Dr. Tom Weinandy has given us the gift of his time and expertise to create a Food Security Index and a dashboard to help us see how the communities we support are doing, and our students and parents are consistently in negative numbers on the index. This is not a good thing. You can read the fascinating results. 

We’ve been surveying our communities for the last four years and have a new Food Security Index to be able to see how our scholars and their families are doing.

The families we serve make an average of $84 per month, with the families in Uganda a distressing $12 per month since the dumpsite was closed after the landslide there over a year ago.

Earlier this week, I was talking with Anthony, a scholar in Honduras who is now a barber, to ask him what it was like at the age of five going to the dumpsite instead of school.

“We were desperate,” he told me, so I had to go to help my mom. I was curious how he knew things were desperate. Was that something his mother told him or were there things he could see that made him feel that way?

“We had no food,’ he explained. “We had to go to the dump if we wanted to eat.”

When our team met Anthony, he had been sorting through garbage for his entire life.

I was just with Anthony a few weeks ago in San Pedro Sula. With other scholars, their moms, and some friends from Toledo, we made and packaged 350 tortillas and snacks and then loaded them into pickups and drove into the dumpsite to deliver food to the workers there. Within 20 minutes, we gave away all 350 meals, at least 40 or 50 of them to children who were just like Anthony a few years ago.

Friends from Toledo joined me in Honduras and with our scholars, community members, and team members, we cooked meals and distributed them to people digging through trash at the city dumpsite.

Whether we celebrate Thanksgiving with brunch or with dinner, we have so many things to be thankful for. Would you please prayerfully consider making a Thanksgiving gift to help our teams give food to people who desperately need it? A gift of $100 will feed a scholar’s family for a month.

Mike Tenbusch, President

Mike joined International Samaritan in 2018 after two decades of leading social change in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He’s a University of Michigan Law grad and author of The Jonathan Effect: Helping Kids and Schools Win the Battle Against Poverty. He and his wife, Maritza, have three children who keep them young.