There were wonderful art projects and fun games for the kids, and the food was ridiculously delicious, and as if I don’t have enough food issues in my house already, my children are now completely obsessed with Nutella and banana sandwiches on white bread. But I will forgive her this, because in addition to becoming aware of spreadable chocolate, my children are now also aware of the fact that 24,000 kids around the world die every single day from causes that are entirely preventable. And this Halloween, when they go trick-or-treating, they’re each going to carry a little orange box and ask our neighbors for loose change that will, hopefully, help to reduce that number to zero.
Because my friend is not just any old mom who throws a little party, she also happened to have in attendance the President of UNICEF US, a woman named Carol who informed us that those little Halloween boxes raised 4.4 million dollars last year, and have raised over $144 million since the program started fifty-nine years ago. Which is a lot of loose change. She also told us a story about a woman named Rosa whom she’d met on one of her UNICEF trips a few years ago, when she was traveling with a mobile medical unit. She said it was one of those trips where you drive and drive and drive, and then you get to a field and you turn left at a tree, and then all of a sudden you see a hundred people waiting because the doctor only comes by the clinic once a month. The “clinic” consisted of just two rooms: one that is kept sterile, and another that is considered the ward, and is touted for having screens on the windows.
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Risa Green, author of Tales from the Mommy Track on MommyTracked.com, lives in Los Angeles. In the last four years, she has produced two children, called Harper and Davis, and two novels, called Notes from the Underbelly and Tales from the Crib. Her third novel will be published next year.
