I am roughly halfway through my internship with Partners in Health and Wholeness, and the pressure is on. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes activities that make PHW successful. For instance, it can be difficult to engage the community to embrace the idea of a healthy lifestyle, coordinating the events, and research different topics as a small non-profit. I have been to events before of various sorts but did not put much thought into the preparation for them until it became time for me to plan one. From now on, I will appreciate the process and planning of these events a good deal more.
Let us do a comparison of planning an event for Partners in Health and Wholeness and a large Sunday dinner. There is a long process of preparing a love-filled meal for the family. We usually see someone cooking before dinner time, but there is a great deal more that goes into this preparation. For example, at the very least there is grocery shopping involved that may start with couponing and comparing prices to get the best deal. Then there is the travel time back and forth to the grocery store and, of course, the preparation and cooking of the meal. Sometimes the preparation is more involved if the food is fresh from the garden: harvesting the crop, choosing the most ripe produce, the physical labor of bending and squatting, and that is just the first part. It also includes preparing them for the freezer or even the canning process. After all is said and done, the family and friends sit down and partake of this feast as if it were no big deal because of the routineness of it.
Events that are planned by PHW are like this except fifty-times all of the above, plus trying to educate everyone on what is healthy to consume and how to produce and prepare that food. This should not be a task that is shared by just one person in the family or one person in the community. As in the home, the importance of our health should not rest in the hands of a few but should be embraced by all, especially our spiritual and governmental leaders. This ensures that we have the best tools to take care of our physical health, which leads to a healthy community. So I am challenging everyone to be more involved in the healthy preparation of food for their family and our leaders to be more involved with access to healthy, local foods in their community.
— Johnny Rogers, PHW Intern
