Forty-eight-year-old Champale Anderson lives in a St. Louis neighborhood where parents can’t even afford to buy their children a sandwich for school. What she does for those children will make you feel all the feels.
Every weekday, when Anderson finishes her shift with a home health care company, she goes home and starts preparing lunches for the neighborhood kids. Then she sets up a table in front of her house and tops it with bags of food. There are sandwiches, cookies, chips and fruit. Hungry kids get turkey or ham sandwiches on some days, bologna or peanut butter and jelly on others.
Anderson’s food table even has a name – “Champ’s Tear Drops.”
Why does Anderson do this? Because she noticed her friend’s kids would come to her house after school hungry. Sometimes she’d even see them begging for change at a local gas station. Anderson says she loves her neighborhood, where people often take care of each other, but the surrounding area is poverty-stricken and infested with drug activity.
“The parents always tell me ‘thank you,’ too,” Anderson told local station KTVI-TV. “I have one young lady, she doesn’t have much, but she’ll bring a jar of peanut butter or a pack of cookies, whatever she can.”
A mother of six children herself, Anderson doesn’t just make lunches. In some cases, she makes breakfast for kids running late for school. And she makes dinner for kids who come back to her house in the evenings.
“Sometimes kids get a [lunch] bag and come back to my house around 7pm because that may be the only meal they have during the day,” Anderson told Good Morning America. “They ask for another bag and I say ‘Of course.’”
So far, Anderson has primarily used her own money to feed the neighborhood children. She told KTVI-TV that she had a rough childhood and doesn’t want to see other kids going through the same thing she did. “I know I can’t stop [hard times], but I know I can slow it down just a little bit,” she said.
Anderson recently started a GoFundMe page to raise $1500 for food and supplies. As of this writing, she has raised over $54,000.
