The boys and I were incredibly honored to join some friends and create meal packets that are being sent to countries in need. A local church hosted this event. I had never heard of the organization, ‘Feed my Starving Children’, and was in awe over the efficiency and infrastructure this organization has in meeting the practical need of providing nutrition for children in extreme poverty.
If you have an extra moment, I encourage you to visit their Video Library. Check out the second video. It is 5:04. This is the one we watched before we began our two hour shift.
We worked in teams to fill plastic bags with food. Each bag contained six meals. In each bag is a coffee cup full of rice, a smaller coffee cup of soy protein, a small scoop of dehydrated vegetables, and a Tablespoon or two of what is called ‘chicken flavoring’. It looks like the powder you get in a ramen noodle packet. The difference though, is that it’s not a scoop of sodium, it’s a scoop full of vitamins and minerals. The bags were weighed, sealed, and packed into boxes
‘A’ and ‘R’ took turns sealing the bags and placing the bags on numbers to make sure the proper number of bags go into a box (36). I held the bags for sealing, and packed the boxes. It was an awesome team effort with good friends. Our table ended up filling 22 boxes of 36 bags each! 22 boxes x 36 bags per box= 792 bags packed. 792 bags x 6 meals per bag = 4,752 meals! I am not sure how many tables there were, and I don’t recall the final numbers. The only number I remember hearing from them is that in our two hour session, the total number of meals for that room totaled feeding 136 children for a whole year!
One half of our ‘u’ shaped table. This my friend Kelly, her kids, and her brother (who is visiting from Hawaii!)
My friends, Heather and Betsy, and a couple of their wonderful sons…
Sealing the bags with ‘R’…
Packing the boxes. ‘A’ did an excellent job of leading our group in the cheer, “Table Eight is Doing Great!” This was the cue for a floater to come and pick up the box and place it on a pallet to be transferred to a truck.
I gently shook the bags to make sure they were securely sealed, then ‘A’ (or ‘R’) placed them on a number. Once they reached 18, the bags were handed to me for packing into the box…
Cutie pie ‘C’, was our clean up kid. Whenever a bag spilled, he swept up the items and placed them into a bin.
These lovely friends are also family! Hope is in the striped shirt, Leslie and Colleen are her daughters on the right. Meg is Colleens daughter on the left. They all attend the Bible study I am in and Leslie and Colleen also homeschool. How special it would be to share Bible study with the women in my family!
Some of our kids that attended this project…
We will definitely do this again next year!