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The
Pink Room: Thoughts About Intentional Living
Chapter
15/ Food.
Part
1 (Previous post contain the previous chapters.)
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Food has been a big part of my
story. There are these recipes--potatoes at the holidays, ribs, oatmeal
fudge bars, breakfast bake, sugar cookies, and Grandma’s buns…so many things. I
will make oatmeal fudge bars for people and they always ask for the recipe. I
will never forget one health-conscious co-worker clarifying if there were
really four sticks of butter in the recipe. She said, “I thought that must have
been a mistake. So I just used two, but they don’t taste like yours.” No
mistake. There are four.
A friend and I did a project, some
time ago, that required baking cookies. We’d sell them and raise funds for a water
well to be built in Africa. We baked hundreds cookies. With: 187.5 cups of
sugar, 187.5 cups of brown sugar, 500 sacks of butter, 500 eggs, 250 teaspoons
of vanilla, 562.5 cups flour (that is 100 lbs. of flour), 250 teaspoons of
salt, 250 teaspoons of baking soda, and 500 cups of chocolate chips, we sold
250 batches of chocolate chip cookies and raised more than $5000 dollars to
build a water well in Africa.
My
friend, Abby, and I embarked on an adventure a couple years ago. We both read a
book by Donald Miller called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and it
got us thinking... we both wanted to “do something”. Abby was a bit ahead of me
in discerning her “something” to be building water well for a community with no
clean water. At the beginning, the idea of building the well seemed
cost-prohibitive; I mean, it would cost $5000, after all!
After
a few well-timed, conversations and a trip to an Amish community in Shawano, WI
we had time to talk. After pizza and a car ride back to Green Bay, Abby began
dreaming about her well. I asked what she could do to raise money and she spewed
ideas and landed on best talent: baking. Not only was she good at it, she also
really enjoyed it. A no-brainer, raise money by selling cookies and network for
other resources coupled with one of my best talents: planning and networking.
Within 20 minutes we were on the phone with my cousin, Ben, who had told me
about a matching grant a week earlier.
Abby
and Ben talked the following week and it was on! They discussed funding and
matching, the costs and the needs of the project. Then the baking began. It
became obvious that this project was supposed to happen. Within a couple weeks
Abby worked her magic and leveraged her super-friendly personality to “sell” 80
dozen cookies. It was a simple yet charming idea. Cookies for water—she called
it “Cookies for a Cause!” Within 3 months we were done! 250 people received a Water
Well and we wrote an amazing story. Since that time we have done a few other
small scale projects.
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The
theme of our story: Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
