This is a popular Haitian proverb that says ‘Sak vid pa kanpe’, which means an empty sack cannot stand. The “sack” in this proverb is reflective of a sack of flour. Just as the sack is kept upright by the flour inside, it suggests that having enough nourishment through food is essential for carrying out one's duties effectively. It also suggests that in order to function well or be successful, one needs to have the necessary resources, such as knowledge, experience, skills, or certain degree of material possessions.
To put it in more simply, one can't function properly on an empty stomach. I learned this yesterday morning. I needed to fast for annual blood test. Normally it would be very easy: get up and walk to the medical lab closeby. But things have changed since the pandemic: not only has one to book for the test online to avoid a long wait, the lab close to us stopped doing testing all together this year.
And to make it worse, I woke up just past 3:30am (Maowi's doing) and the booked testing time was 9:30am, it was a long 6+ hours to kill before I could eat anything:
- 3:45am - 4am, fed Maowi and cleaned his litterbox
- 4am - 6am, read a book and posted a couple comments in WXC blog
- 6am - 6:40am, baked 2 weeks worth of home-made breakfast cereal for Hubby (see photo below)
- 7am, all my brain functions stopped, all I could see and think was food:
the wonderful smell from the baked cereal; food that I never noticed much before and showed up everywhere now but I couldn't eat them. I wished I had eaten more the night before; I wished I didn't go to washroom so my stomach wouldn't feel this empty; I didn't understand those religions which require fasting, but now I have better understanding the suffering and sacrifice those people endure.
- 7:15am, I found a way to resolve it: I went back to sleep, with Maowi by my side. 
What a start of a day, and I don't wish it on any of you.
Cheers and wish you all another enjoyable weekend!
