Alay Burgess-Rocker’s charitable gesture will provide 60 free lunches for children in four schools

By Jessie Moniz Hardy

Most six year old girls want a Barbie or a new dress for their birthday, Purvis Primary School student Alay Burgess-Rocker wants to feed the hungry.

When Alay turns six on April 15, her family plan to provide lunch to over 60 needy children in the school system.

Alay will never know who she has helped because the children receiving lunch will be anonymous. She and her mother are calling the project Lunches of Love.

Lunches of Love started quietly when Alay began asking her mother, Marica Burgess, for extra snacks in her lunch box.

“She was asking for more and more,” said Ms Burgess. “Finally, I said, ‘Alay, are you actually eating all these snacks? Why are you taking so many snacks to school?’.”

It turned out that Alay was sharing her recess munchies with her friends.

Some of them simply preferred Alay’s snacks to their own, and some of them didn’t have any of their own.

Ms Burgess began providing Alay with enough snacks to share. Surprisingly, her act of charity was not without sacrifice.

“One of my friends said she wouldn’t play with me anymore because I was being ‘too nice’,” said Alay. But she wasn’t dissuaded.

“It’s good to be kind,” Alay said.

When her mother heard that she had lost a friend for being generous, she was horrified.

“I wanted to show her how important it is to display acts of kindness,” said Ms Burgess.

Ms Burgess talked with teachers and was surprised to learn that some of Alay’s school mates may have been eating Alay’s snacks because they were hungry and didn’t have any snacks of their own.

“I learned that there were children in the school who came to school not only without snacks but without any lunch at all,” she said. “Then I heard about the Coalition for Protection of Children’s school breakfast programme that provides breakfast to children in the school system who might otherwise come to school without food in their stomachs.”

She and Alay talked and decided to do something special. On Alay’s sixth birthday on April 15, she and her mother will provide lunch for sixty children in four different schools.

The day is being called “Lunches of Love” and Alay has drawn a special picture that has been turned into a sticker and flyer.

The lunch which will include a wrap, a water, two snacks and a comic book. Children receiving it will be from the Coalition’s breakfast programme and were chosen by their guidance counsellors. Alay and her mother will never know who received their kind gift, but still they are excited.

“The other important thing is to raise awareness,” said Ms Burgess. “The Coalition for Protection of Children is down on donations to their breakfast programme. It costs them $50 per child, per week, to provide breakfast. I would like to encourage the public to continue donating to this programme.

“I wanted others to be compelled to do something as well, not just leave it to the charities or government. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice for me to help one other child.”

And she said, so far, other parents have come to her to say they would like to help or do something similar.

“It is creating that buzz that I was hoping it would,” she said. “My heart was moved to find out there were children like that in Bermuda going to school.”

Alay and her mother are grateful to Hunts Food and Supplies for helping with Alana’s birthday project.

“Everything we need was donated by them,” she said. “Tops has also helped us.”

For more information, contact the Coalition for the Protection of Children at www.coalition.bm.