Breaking the Silence

I did it!

:D Operation: Vow of Silence = successful! :)

Let me tell you, it was weird. It didn’t even really feel like I didn’t talk all day. Was it hard? You bet. But it was a different “hard” than I though it would be. The hard parts weren’t those “OMG-I-just-thought-of-something-really-important-to-say-and-I-have-to-say-it-NOW” moments, it was when I didn’t talk for a long time and got caught up in something else, like reading or something, that when someone called my name and looked up, I FORGOT! I seriously took in that breath you take before a sentence every time, and I’ll admit it: Once, that breathy/mumbly first two words that you say half in your head/half out loud while you’re warming up for a sentence came out and then I was like... OH YEAH! LOL. But it was actually surprisingly not as hard as I thought it would be to stay off twitter, facebook and email. It was hard, but not THAT hard [But the first thing I did this morning was log on... Haha.]. The hardest part, actually, was being bored! Man, I didn’t even realize how much of my time TALKING keeps me occupied! Haha.

Anywaysss... I DID IT! 24 hours of silence! Would I do it again? Sure. Should you do it? Absolutely! :D

But, telling you about my day isn’t really the point of this blog post. Breaking the silence is the point, so here it goes:

 In our North-American society, poverty is often a taboo. If we don’t know about it, talk about it, see it, hear about it, then it doesn’t exist. We’re excused from doing something.

Well guess what.

I’m breaking the silence.

You’re reading this blog post, so you can’t act like you don’t know anymore: Poverty is real.

121 million children aren’t receiving a formal education. More than half of them are girls.

300 million children under that age of 5 live in areas affected by armed conflict.

One in three children in developing countries are malnourished and are sick almost 50% of the year.

21 000 children die each day from preventable diseases. That’s one every four seconds.

But those are stats. Overwhelming stats that make you say to yourself, “I can’t change anything, why try?”

Fine.

But this girl is not a stat. This boy is not a stat. Lina is not a stat. Neither is Milda or Daniel.

They are real kids with real dreams and real problems and real lives. Lives that have a purpose that their Creator - the same Creator that created YOU - breathed into them. Lives that are just waiting for that chance.

But society told them no. Just because they we’re born in the third world. Society told them “Silence!” and they obeyed because they were helpless to speak out, just because no one would listen. Society told them, and then ignored them, never speaking about them again.

The silence needs to be broken.

So let’s speak out. Together. Because we’re getting close, really close, to being loud enough that poverty doesn’t have to be a taboo anymore.

It can just be a distant memory.



Many people supported my during my Vow of Silence, which resulted in this:

Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyou! I set a goal for $200 and it was far surpassed! To all who contributed: THANK YOU. You guys...! $350 provides seven classrooms with school supplies. Or three families with clean drinking water. We’ve made a HUGE difference. Thank you!

Oh! And it’s not too late to donate if you wanna! I’ll be keeping my fundraising page up, probably through the weekend, so if you’d like to donate, please click here. 

Thanks again!! <3

For more information on Free the Children, please visit their website.