At the end of 2011, my wife Jen and I decided we would give of either our time or our money at least once per week in 2012. We decided to donate at least two hours of our time or at least $25 each week. As we began the new year, many of our friends were interested in our new commitment, and so I decided to write about the organizations we work with and the experiences we have. The stories told here are meant to shed some light on volunteering - the kind of work that is out there, and the clientele that is served, and to provide information about who is making a difference out there, and what you can do to help. Please come back often and share our experiences as we move through our giving year.

Also, we are always looking for new organizations to work with, groups that are doing good work and could use either our hands or our money. If you know of a volunteer opportunity or worthy cause, please leave it in a comment. Thanks for your help!

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Week 50 - Feed My Starving Children

This week we went back to Feed My Starving Children to pack food bags for malnourished children.  This will be our last visit of the year with them, but as with so many of the places we have been, we plan to continue to work there even after our year is up.  As is our recent custom, we brought along our friend Jen, who had never been to FMSC before.

This time around, it looked like we might be able to pack a lot because there was a couple of large groups with adults and teenagers, and very few smaller children.  It is great when the small children come out and get their first experience volunteering, but they don't pack as quickly as a motivated 17 year old.  Anyway, it looked like a good group, but things started a little sluggish.  It turned out that most of the people were there for the first time, and so things started a little slow.  The workers at FMSC could see by the make-up of the group that we had the potential to break the record for how many boxes could be packed in one session, and they started pushing everyone right away to try to go as fast as possible.  Fortunately, almost every table got the hang of things pretty quickly.

We grabbed a table right away and jumped into our normal positions - me on sealing bags, Jen (my wife) on holding bags under the funnel and weighing them, and Jen (our friend) on scooping ingredients.  We were joined by a father and teenage daughter who were new to packing, and so we had to give them a few pointers, but things got rolling soon enough.  It turned out to be one of our most productive sessions ever, with our table (consisting of two packing stations) packing 18 boxes of food in just over a hour.  Since there are 216 meals in a box, it means we packed 3,888 meals.

At the end of the session, it seemed like there was a chance we had broken the record.  A lot of the table were saying they had reached numbers like ours.  The record is 101-1/2 boxes in a 1-1/2 session (only about 1 hour of packing after instructions and clean up).  There are six tables, and if each of them had hit 18 boxes, we would have smashed the record.  After we cleaned up and prayed over the food, we headed back to the seating area to find out how we did.  The final tally looked like this:


We didn't hit the record, but we pack a lot of food.  It is worth pointing out that the "Kids Fed" number refers to the number of children who can eat for a whole year based on the packing we did in one hour of hard work.  Also worth noting is the cost.  Even at $0.22 per meal, it adds up.  FMSC always shows this number because they remind the workers that other people had to give the money to buy the meals before we ever packed them.

The shipment we packed was part of about 217,000 meals that were leaving for Nicaragua this week.  That is one of the nice things about working at FMSC.  They pack six days per week and send at least one large shipment every week to a place they identify for you.  We have packed for shipments to places all over Africa and Central America, and to Haiti, where poverty and starvation always seems to have a death grip.



The evening turned out to be a lot of fun, and very productive.  Jen enjoyed her first time and we enjoyed being back.  We are getting to be old hands at packing, and it is fun to help others get the hang of it.  When faced with all of the bad things that happen in our world, the seeming forward progress of evil and devastation, this kind of work feels like a tangible stand in opposition to those forces.  When it seems like we are powerless to prevent the senseless deaths of others, this is a way to gain a measure of power, to take real, meaningful, direct action to fight the darkness.  All the time, but especially at Christmas time, this feels like helping to bring light into the world where it is desperately needed.

For more information about Feed My Starving Children, including opportunities to pack food or to donate, go to Feed My Starving Children.

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