St. Charles Residents Help Feed Starving Kids Overseas

Willing hands and joyful heart were the order of the day, and hairnets were the head gear du jour Saturday at , where volunteers gathered in shifts to put together meal packages to feed starving children around the world.

They came in family groups, neighborhoods groups, clubs and even school groups — a contingent from St. Charles East was there for part of the day — working in two-hour shifts to pack as many meals as possible to feed starving children around the world.

Feed My Starving Children, the agency that runs the program and distributes the food, says there is more than enough food being produced into the world today to ensure that no on goes hungry, yet 1 billion do.

When they arrived, the volunteers watched a short video that laid out these and other tidbits of information related to world hunger and the efforts to combat it by Feed My Starving Children. The Christian agency has used science and health experts to come up with an inexpensive way to feed the starving a nutritious meal of soy, rice, vegetables, and the vitamin and mineral vegetarian chicken flavoring mix. The meals are designed to adhere to the dietary restrictions of all faiths while providing the children the nutrition they need to survive.

Each meal costs just 22 center, and there are six meals inside each Manna Pack. The 206 boxes the volunteers packed Saturday morning contain enough food to feed nearly 122 children three times a day.

Volunteers then moved to the church gymnasium, where church staffers, flight attendant style, demonstrated how each of the various task were performed. The first step was using disinfecting wipes to clean hands and wrists before the work began. Volunteers working directly with the food also then donned plastic gloves.

Oh yes, and everyone wore hairnets.

Then the work began.

The volunteers were scattered among a handful of tables set out in rectangles around the gymnasium. The food handlers measured and poured the four ingredients into the funnel leading into each Manna Pack bag.

Two workers manned the funnel, making sure one of the plastic bags was nearly always in place as their partner took away the finished back to ensure its weight was right. Each MannaPack then was handed off to a team that pressed the air out of the bag before sealing it. They also counted the bags and stacked 36 into each box.

From their, runners picked up the boxes and took them to a warehousing area, where the boxes were sealed and then stacked onto pallets for shipping..

If there were fits and starts, they were virtually unnoticeable. The crowd was in good spirits throughout their two-hour shift.

“It’s good to get out and do something physical like this, especially if you work in an office,” one volunteer said.

The conversation was friendly, and the volunteers expressed amazement that these simple meals could provide so great a need.

Larry Stratton, director of community impact for Christ Community Church, said Saturday that the church hopes to draw in 5,000 volunteers to pack 1 million meals for Feed My Starving Children.

There were four shifts scheduled to work at the St. Charles church on Saturday, and three shifts are due on Sunday. Another MobilePack event ran Friday and Saturday at the church’s campus in DeKalb.

More MobilePack events are more coming up:

• St. Charles Campus: Nov. 9-10
• Aurora (Blackberry Creek): Nov. 9-10
• Bartlett: Nov. 9-10

Anyone interested in participating is encouraged to register for a two-hour packing spot at ccclife.org/fmsc. Volunteers do not need to attend Christ Community Church.

Related:

• Feed My Starving Children
• Feed My Starving Children FAQ
• Christ Community Church online

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