THE TRAVELING POD

March 2022

La Paz, Bolivia

Never have I ran an event of this size in a foreign country, and starting with nothing. There were plenty of lessons learnt!

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On March 28^th in La Paz Bolivia, I organized an event with a team of people called ‘The Pizza Challenge’. Overall, on the day, we had 34 Bolivian volunteers that helped express the vision of event. This vision was to demonstrate love, value and acceptance to the kids of the street by feeding them pizza, giving them a gift, and introducing them to services that they could not access. This is the flyer that we used to fund raise and attract resources for the event.

Event pamphlet

On the event, we cooked 120 pizzas that were made from two locations; Malegria Bar and Imilla Alzada, and we were blessed to have their kitchen staff help us on the day. We raised enough funds to have put together 100 gifts which included; custom bags and t-shirts, pair of socks, tooth brush and tooth paste, and 60 units each of candies that they can use to sell for income. The activities we had were fantastic, they involved the kids, and I saw a lot of laughing and happy faces. We had an art activity, games, songs and dancing. Whilst all the activities were running, we had a doctor and psychologists, including university psychologist students from the University Mayor de San Andrès (UMSA), that walked around to talk to the kids and their families.

The outcome of this event has created an opportunity for a program to be established between the student psychologist and the unprotected kids.

A massive thank you to my Boliviano mumma for walking this journey next to me, and without your servant’s heart, this would not have been the same outcome.

Not many people know how the pizza challenge idea came about, and so this is how the idea was birthed for me. I was meeting with a friend at her hostel one day, and I decided to make three pizzas to share with her and other people at her hostel. During lunch, we had a big container full of homemade pizzas waiting for any person who walked past in the hostel. We introduced ourselves and invited people to join us for lunch and a chat. After lunch, one of the Israeli men came up to me, and gifted me with his own hat. He said to me that he was so impressed that a random person invited him to their lunch and gave him pizza, that he wanted to give me his hat. It was a nice hat too. He continued to say that someone gave him this hat, and he is giving it to me, and if I decide to, that I can give it to someone else. I was inspired that a little act of kindness had impacted him, and I thought how powerful food was. I then decided that maybe making pizzas for an orphanage would also impact the kids too. I carried that idea with me on my first rural volunteer trip with Medfund, and during my transportation, I told Joey from Medfund about my idea. I mentioned that I wanted to cook pizzas for an orphanage, and he said it was a good idea but a better idea would be to cook pizzas for the kids on the street in La Paz. The kids on the street miss out on the resources that orphanages get. That day the idea of ‘The Pizza Challenge was born’.