Feed My Starving Children

My friend and my daughter and I had fun working a shift packing meal pouches for the organization Feed My Starving Children today. This is the second year that my church has organized and sponsored one of these events.  Over 1000 people from surrounding churches and communities will work over three days to set up and pack the meals this year. One of the women working at our station drove 50 miles to volunteer!

In 2009, our community raised over $40,000, packed 229,608 meals, and fed over 620 children in Haiti for a year!! http://www.hiddenv.com/fmsc/244-2009packing . (Volunteers this year were encouraged to bring in a food donation for the local food pantries with a goal of gathering one ton of food to help the hungry locally.)

It starts with raising the money to buy and truck in the ingredients for the food pouches which contain everything a starving child needs to survive and thrive: Carbs (rice), Soy crumbles (protein), dehydrated  vegetables, and vegetarian chicken-flavored powder containing 20 vitamins and minerals. Each pouch feeds multiple kids (six meals per pouch) and is formulated to bring a person who is starving back to health.  I got to taste this rice mixture, and it is bland but pretty good.

Each meal costs 17 cents, and 94 percent of the money donated goes right into food.  Volunteers of all ages, half of them under the age of 18, pack the meals. The food goes all over the world to organizations that are already in place and caring for people. The food isn’t being stolen or misdirected; it all has a specific destination with people to handle it properly when it arrives.  Feed My Starving Children was already feeding people in Haiti before the earthquakes and continues today.

All the people in our one-and-a-half hour shift packed 160 boxes (36 meal pouches each) with 34,560 meals—that is enough food to feed 94 children for one year! When you work at one of these events, you really do make a big difference and directly help starving children.  

You don’t have to look at those pictures of kids with their ribs sticking out and feel helpless anymore.  This is good news for everyone.  If you want to find out more about Feed My Starving Children you can go to their web site www.fmsc.org . Begonia

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