Graduation Speech: The Walk For Hunger

Hello everyone! Glad to be back and I'm excited to tell you about a truly amazing experience that I was part of a few weeks back. I've been meaning to write this post for a while but have only gotten around to it now. But hey - better late than never right?

For any of you that don't know, the Walk for Hunger took place this year on May 6. This is a 20 mile walk in Boston that raises both awareness and funds for family struggling with hunger in Massachusetts. I participated in this walk with some of my classmates, and though I did not complete the full 20 miles or raise a crazy amount of money for it, I am glad that I chose to participate and proud of what I accomplished.

The only thing I can compare the Walk for Hunger to, out of what I have experienced in my life, is the school walkout that happened a while back. On that day, most of our school - seventh graders, eighth graders, and teachers - gathered in the gym to hold 17 minutes of silence in memory of the victims who lost their lives in the Parkland shooting.

Honestly, I did not expect that that many middle schoolers could have the maturity to do something like this. Yet I was proved wrong. In those seventeen minutes with so many usually rambunctious middle schoolers all crowded in one room with their friends, no one spoke. There was no noise, other than the occasional sneezes or coughs, and even those did not set off the laughter I expected them to. Were we the same set of people who couldn't ever keep quiet when asked to in usual school meetings?

Obviously, we were. And what that event taught me is that for all that people may do on a day to day basis, our community is remarkably capable of pulling together when the need is there and we know we can make a