Vocations: Marriage and the Single Life

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The youth group from Holy Family parish fast for 24 hours and help collect food at the Harrisville Wallmart for Catholic Community Services Food Bank in Ogden.

OGDEN — Holy Family Parish youth walked in the shoes of the poor for 24 hours by going without food and sleeping outside on the parish lawn Oct. 1-25 to raise funds for Catholic Community Services Food Bank in Ogden. The 13- to 17- year-olds ingested only water, juice and broth and slept in tents made out of cardboard boxes.

Father Patrick Elliott, pastor, and the congregation congratulated the youth at the conclusion of the 5 p.m. Saturday Mass which also concluded the fast.

“I thought I was going to pass out by the time we went to Mass I was so hungry,” said Katie Bailey, who attends South Ogden Junior High.

“Then when we received the Eucharist, we knew we would be OK,” added her sister, Kimi Bailey.

“I was very hungry during the fast,” said Vicki Shaw-Aviles. “The last few hours were going so slowly I thought 5 o’clock would never come. I pretty much ran down to eat dinner after Mass. I’m surprised everyone in church couldn’t hear our stomachs growling.”

Not eating at all was hard for Sydney Lehr, who attends Sunset Junior High. “I’m the kind of person who likes to eat snacks constantly,” she said. I got cramps in my stomach and it made me realize this is how people who have to go without food must feel every day. I really had sympathy for the homeless.”

Their tents, made from office chair boxes, were on a hill and kept sliding down during the night, said Lehr. “It was very cold outside and I realized how loud it is and impossible it must be for people to sleep outside with cars honking and dogs barking,” she said. “I think I only slept about an hour.”

Patrick Smith said he slept about five hours, but woke up when his shoes fell off and his feet got cold hanging out of the box. All he had to keep him warm was a sweater, a blanket and a hat. “Homeless people have it pretty hard,” he said.

Shaw-Aviles came up with the idea of putting two cardboard boxes together so her feet wouldn’t hang out, but she realized that in bad weather, the poor suffer when their boxes get ruined. “I learned that we take everything for granted,” she said “We should consider ourselves lucky to have what we have, to wake up in a warm bed with food waiting for us and to have three meals a day while others can barely have one meal. Some people aren’t able to go to school or work, but stay on the streets trying to get money.”

The youth group also performed a service project by collecting food at the Harrisville WalMart for the Ogden Catholic Community Services Food Bank.

“We did hard labor by loading boxes of food into trucks,” said Lehr. “At first we were mad that they made us work with food while we were starving, but then we realized we were helping a lot of poor people while we were being them. I almost fell asleep while we were working because I was low on energy.”

“It made me think about how I wear name-brand clothes and the poor sometimes eat scraps from the garbage,” said Devrey Martin, from South Ogden Junior High.

Youth Minister Pat Martin said 12 youth participated in this project. “We have an amazing group of kids who took this project very seriously,” she said. “I was reading them data such as a child dies every five seconds from malnutrition and it really got their attention.”