Only a short drive from the Carolina beach towns of Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, but a world away from their affluence, you’ll find our incredible partners at the Brunswick County School System. Tina Ward and Lea Anne Werder manage the school nutrition department for this vast, rural North Carolina county.
And across that 1,000 miles there are a lot of kids going hungry in the summer: 63% of kids in Brunswick County are food insecure. In big, rural counties like Brunswick, traditional summer meals sites in school cafeterias or churches won’t work. For years, Ward dreamed about taking the food to the kids with a mobile meals program.
Her dreams recently came true when a county school bus was up for retirement. She jumped at the chance to give this old school bus a new purpose — and in honor of that purpose she named it “Yummy”.
We rode with Yummy to two mobile home communities, where paint peeled off the sides of rusting cars in the front yards and broken windows were boarded up with plywood. Some of the homes clearly had no running water; families relied on water storage tanks next to the trailers. When Yummy rolled in, kids streamed out of houses and climbed aboard.
“I’ve seen a lot of poverty over the years,” Ward said. “Here in Brunswick County, public housing is limited. Instead, what you find are mobile home parks. I’ve got 40 years of experience under my belt, and this is one of the most deplorable areas I’ve ever seen. But the kids are happy, and they’re excited about getting their lunch. It does your heart good.”
Thanks to a small portable air conditioner and tables with connected benches along its length, Yummy is a comfortable place for children to enjoy a meal. And when the kids get off the bus, they each take a free book provided by the county.
