The world I live in

I am currently the head girls track coach of the high school at which I teach. This is the first year I've been "in charge" and so far it's been a blast... a stressful blast... but a blast nonetheless. I am trying to change a number of things about the team so that all the girls have a better experience and really enjoy the season. In the past, during meets, the girls have been given double cheeseburgers, fries, and sodas... for lunch... in the middle of a meet. This is a huge problem and I don't want to teach these girls that it's ok for athletes to eat like that! In an effort to make better nutritional use of the team's allotted food money, I took a survey this week of acceptable, healthy snacks, and drove the 60 miles into town last night to pick up food for Saturday's meet.

I was shopping for 40 athletes and had a good budget so I definitely enjoyed myself. I pushed the cart around the store for an hour filling it with apples, oranges, bananas, peanut butter, jelly, whole wheat bread, string cheese, and a couple cases of gatorade. I wheeled my haul up to the front of the store with pride... my team was going to be very well fueled this week... but then ran into a big problem. The store did not accept the team's credit card; our school district hasn't been paying its bills so we won't be able to get food this week.

One would think I might have gotten upset at this, but my colleague (who had come along for the shopping extravaganza) and I couldn't do anything but laugh... We weren't surprised, this is just a normal occurrence when one works in a severely underfunded, slightly corrupt school district. We both bought ourselves a bottle of red wine (using our personal credit cards which were happily accepted) and chuckled in amazement as the poor store clerk began re-shelving my track team's would-be lunch.

I've been told that the Navajo grocery store will still accept the cards. That chain tends to have a much smaller selection of produce and healthy items but I will venture over there today in hopes of finding a way to feed my team something other than double cheeseburgers, fries, and soda.

I can't help but think that this is one of the big reasons why obesity is so rampant in low-income communities... it's not easy to eat healthfully when you're running into these problems on a regular basis.