I used to follow a woman on YouTube named JennyHatch. I first began watching her for her ‘mommy
vlogs’. I knew that she was “crunchy”
and I knew that she was LDS. I put
“crunchy” in quotes because she wasn’t doing it to be cool. Crunchy, in today’s world, can be used to
describe anything from home-steading, attachment parenting, cloth diapering,
baby-wearing, home-schooling, unschooling, non-vaccinating, any of the above,
all of the above, etc. She wasn’t doing
it because it was the next big thing to breastfeed your kids, wear your babies
and put them in cloth diapers. You could
tell that she was doing it because it was her calling to lead her life in this
way, and she never referred to herself as “crunchy”. She made her own bread(s), had some of her
children at home and did a lot of work with birth networks helping other women
to see that you had a choice besides being “gutted like a fish” for your
birth. One day when I was bored I looked
at some of her older videos and she had videos of her 72 hour kits, long term
food and long term water storage. I couldn’t help but watch all of her videos on
these subjects and a lot of the related videos – common curiosity got the
better of me because I couldn’t help but wonder what she was preparing for or
what did she think was going to happen.
I had done a bit of research on the LDS church growing up but had never
paid attention to their beliefs on preparing for disasters and food/water storage.
This was INSTANTLY interesting to me because, as your
average American, I had no idea that people were ‘hoarding’ food and water for
long term storage or that people were making these 72 hour kits, or bug out
bags or anything of the sort.
Yes,
according to the American Red Cross
http://www.redcross.org/prepare/location/home-family/get-kit
they recommend that you have a 2 week supply of food and water at your home,
but I don’t recall ever learning this while growing up, at school, or in the
news.
Similarly, FEMA requests here:
http://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit
that you have at least three days worth of food, water and supplies.
If you take a step back, it makes sense
because in the event of an emergency the Red Cross or FEMA isn’t going to be
able to instantly get to your house and fix everything.
If we have learned anything over the last few
years from the major disasters that we have had, it’s that you, as a family
unit, should be prepared for yourself for at least a week if not longer.
Now does this mean that you need to go crazy
and immediately stock pile a year’s supply of food?
Possibly not since the expense for that is
great and logistically that might not be the best idea for your family.
For instance, my husband and I are renting
the house that we are in right now.
With
that situation, it is feasible to prep a bit with food and water, however if we
have to move, I don’t want to move multiple 55 gallon drums of water.
We have decided that we will do multiple
different food storage plans, a year round garden, and two weeks worth of water
storage.
Depending on the outcome of those
items, we might do more – we might revamp what we do along the way...
Since then I have been reading everything that I can get my
hands on and watching videos from random people who call themselves ‘preppers’
to get a better idea of what they have stowed away or in their bug out bags. The same way that on a previous post I
compiled a list of items that I felt like we needed to buy for our “survival
list”, I am going to start a list of items that we need in our 72 hour kits/bug
out bags. I will be using those terms
interchangeably in my blog because I want them to accomplish the same purpose. I am going to start with a compilation of
FEMA + Red Cross and their recommendations and adding or deleting as I see
fit.
I would like to say that I hate how the media portrays most
people who publicly prep today because it’s like they just want the attention
and don’t want to do anything to stop the fact that they are all seen as radical
extremists who give all people who prep a bad name. All you hear about recently is “prepper has
over 90 assault rifles” or they have been on that Doomsday Prepper show. It doesn’t matter if you have one gun or 19, or
one gallon of water or 550,000, they will make a case against you that you
belong in a mental institution. While I
understand that we, as a group, feel the need to spread the word and get others
to prepare for disasters themselves, most of the time I feel like we should
just stay quiet to avoid the public ridicule.
The more that the media portrays preppers as crazy; the less likely you
are to be able to get people to seriously join in and become a functioning
member of a future disastrous state.
Now I admit that I have watched these types of shows
numerous times and have learned some lessons about what to do and not to do
regarding food and water storage. I
think that watching shows like that can be an invaluable resource because you
can learn from others mistakes since there really isn’t a lot of information
out there on long term food storage to the general public except what you read
on the Internet. However, with as much
awesome information that they could show on that television program, they
choose to show the gentleman who has spent like 60+ years making his own fall
out shelter out of abandoned school buses and wants to take your children in
the event of a radioactive issue but won’t let adults come…. Creepy and scary.
I am constantly trying but we should all be trying to
alter the way that we are viewed by the public, because ideally, an overall
intelligently prepped population would make any disaster easier on us all than
one person with a radioactive bus shelter.
My other blogs on this journey will be on http://suburbanhomesteadandprepper.blogspot.com
- Sara
