It was a crisp fall morning and the morning car ride felt long and bumpy. I had fresh blueberry muffins sitting in my lap. It was a school day but not an ordinary one, me and two of my other friends were going on an “experience” according to my teacher. We had each bought 2 bags full of fresh home cooked muffins, and as the smell wafted in the air of my teacher’s minivan we began our venture. As we slowly turned the corner arriving at the school our teacher Mrs. M. had just finished explaining that our food was going to help other kids to insure they didn’t go hungry through the school day. We jumped up out of the car and proudly marched to the bags of muffins across the street and towards the school. I was so excited, yet I wasn’t sure why I was feeling that way. As I looked up into the playground I was struck by those who were playing. It was the first time I experienced such a large population of a different skin color than what I saw at my own school. I remember a little girl by the name of Feather helped us take the bags from the front door to their community kitchen. We entered the doors and a cold draft draft came from above head, we wandered over to the table of kids devouring bowls of cereal provided by the school. My friends and I were whispering back and forth about how cool it was to have cereal at school and never thought much about it. It wasn’t until the car ride home where we started to talk about our experience. Our teacher explained that it was not just morning cereal time it was that they were given the food that their guardians could not provide and that sometimes children who do not look the same as we did do not always have the advantages in life that we receive.
Delivering muffins took on a whole new sense of importance and opened my eyes to the inequalities that existed right within our city. This was my moment of realization coming from a rich school where the majority of the kids in my class were those who shared the same skin color as me.
Before this experience I was part of the problem regardless of me being young. I did not notice differences of skin and what came along with that, I was a young white female oblivious to the occurrences that were happening to children who were my own age. Although my schooling at that point had briefly touched the base of different ethnicities I was not nearly educated enough to grasp the entirety of its issues. I remember it feeling like a bizarre concept and going home to my parents asking a hundred questions such as “why don’t we learn about people who look different from me in school?”. I vividly remember that everytime muffins were in need of delivery I would race to the office and be the first one on the list because helping other people felt good and each experience was a new opportunity to understand more about the outside world.
