On Saturday I was given two prompts, One, a sentence: "What I heard that afternoon completely took me by surprise." The other one, a picture from The Guardian of people about to swim in a pond:
I was told not to stop writing, even when I wanted to think of a new sentence, so what I wrote, kinda sounded a bit weird. All through my writing, my mom kept giving me new prompts that I had to include in some way and that really stressed me out.
The story I came up with is in the following blog: http://taletree.blogspot.com/
I always knew that there were hundreds of homeless and hungry people around the world and when we found a website that told us that we could help, I didn't want to miss the opportunity, so I asked my mother to write to the head of London StreetFood Bank and we immediately got a reply telling us that our help would be appreciated.
I was looking forward to helping all week. We arrived at Pret to see a journalist arguing with the Manager of the shop about coming in to take photos. My mum and I were allowed in, but had to wait till they finished arguing before we could take the sandwiches.
Only when I got to Pret did I realise how much food from shops gets wasted. So many delicious desserts, sumptuous sandwiches and briliant breads get put in the bin when they don't even have the tiniest bit of mould on them and aren't stale in the slightest.
Packing the sandwiches into the suitcase and rucksack that we brought was pretty fun. I worried that I wouldn't be able to have enough space in the bags so I had to pack the sandwiches really carefully in square shapes with one triangle on top of another. I worried about crushing the food, especially the hot wraps. I put them together in the side pockets of the rucksack to keep them warm.
About five minutes after we got to Charing Cross, we started handing out pastries, salads, desserts and sandwiches. It was really hard calling out the sandwich flavours because most of them were not labelled. When I handed out desserts, everyone was really keen on getting one asking for large ones and sometimes even taking from our suitcase.
When all the sandwiches were finished, I felt really happy because I knew I'd done a good thing. I felt really sorry for the homeless people though. Because I knew that there weren't many people handing out sandwiches and the hungry people looked forward to getting the sandwiches all day. I felt bad I couldn't be there every day. And I hoped that there would be more people volunteering to help the homeless and hungry who cannot ever be sure when or where they will get their next meal.
When people mentioned homeless and hungry people I always used to imagine people in Africa or other far-off places like that, who don't have enough porridge or water to keep them alive, but until this week I did not ever think of there being homeless people so near to me here in London. And when people talked about how much food was wasted, I always thought about mouldy apples and three day-old boiled pasta being thrown away by households. But now when people mention food wastage and/ or hunger I will know how real and close to me it is.
I got back from school feeling tired, cold and hungry. There was no food ready, and to make it worse, I had just come from swimming and my hair was wet. I felt a bit tired of school today; it's always the same. I don't like singing assembly, the structure of the day, the teaching assistant from another class. Sometimes it feels like a different world and I am the same as everyone else there, and no-one cares about what I really want to do.
Today when I came back from school I saw my mum taking a tray out of the oven. It had an onion, cut in half, sweet potatoes, half a chilli two halves of a butternut, one of them containing a garlic bulb in the hollow where the seeds had been scooped out. My mum said she was going to make soup. I ate some sweet potato slices and offered to help her make the soup.
