Provident Living

I gave a talk today about Provident Living. One of the things Matt and I have been working on over the past year is building our food storage based on this easy list:

We modified it to fit our needs (for example, as grad students in a tiny apartment, we really don't have room for all the flour and sugar it recommends) but it's been great to get into the habit of buying something extra with every shopping trip and building our own food storage. We've also worked on our own 72 hour emergency kits, which are also almost complete.

My first real-life encounters with emergency preparedness came when I was on my mission. In the Dominican, you don't have electricity all the time, you may not have running water all of the time, and there is a higher likelihood of emergencies and natural disasters. Through experience, I learned to always have candles, water, food, and extra money on hand. You never know when the mission president would call and tell you about a hurricane warning, where you have to stay inside for several days and survive off of what you already have. I hope that even though I'm living in a 1st world country, I can still remember that sometimes disaster can leave us living in 3rd world conditions, and that it's important to store up what we can to be self-reliant.

Rhetorically,
Rebekah