Hunger
Kids Helping Kids
Nine-year-old Emmy wanted to make a difference.
Following the devastating December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, she wanted to help kids her own age recover from the most debilitating natural disaster in history.
The scenes on the nightly news scared her. She saw crying children, their homes and lives ravaged by the unpredictable and ruthless tidal waves. Emmy wanted to help them in any way she could.
This is a common story: kids helping kids in times of crisis.
Justice Squared jumped in to launch “Operation Chicken Soup,” an interfaith and intercultural effort to ensure that kids impacted by the tsunami would have nutritious meals – something that was becoming scarcer by the hour – in their greatest time of need.
Emmy and her family joined Justice Squared volunteers on “Operation Chicken Soup” to package ready-to-eat meals of instant chicken soup so that people halfway around the world could stave off hunger and malnutrition. The meals that she prepared with her own hands would provide tsunami vicitims with the sustenance to continue rebuilding their homes and lives in the wake of the tragedy that claimed more than 200,000 people.
Altogether, Emmy and her counterparts helped to package more than 20,000 meals for survivors of the tsunami – primarily children and adolescents left to fend for themselves when family members were killed in the disaster.
Emmy’s story is just one example of the outpouring of goodwill and hands-on action that followed the debilitating tsunami in Southeast Asia. The harrowing stories of survivors reverberated across the world, and kids like Emmy, with the help of Justice Squared, lined up to help kids their age and their families make it through the crisis.