Friday, March 5, 2010

Giving a helping hand

Last Sunday after a church visit in Sioux Falls, I got to join up with over 30 people from my home church to give a helping hand to children around the world. (This was after a great pork feed and pie auction to help the youth of the church I visited raise money for their missions trip this summer.)

We gathered in the former grocery store where my sister and I shopped during seminary to pack food. A man from Maple Grove, MN started an organization called Kids Against Hunger. He had several companies help him come up with a meal that can be served anywhere in the world with as much nutrition as possible in one package. It took several years to perfect the meal. Now there are packing stations all across the United States where people can go and pack healthy meals which will then be sent around the world. We were told that the 7,344 meals we packaged will be sent to Haiti.

This capped off a challenge from the missions committee at church to eat just rice and beans for one week in February and then use the money saved on food to donate to the organization. What a challenge!

In 2 hours around 30 people were able to package 7,344 meals! Amazing!

Here are a few pics from the afternoon...

We all got to wear the very fashionable hairnets and aprons! We had three assembly lines which included filling a bag with the four main ingredients, weighing the bags, sealing the bags, putting the bags into boxes, and decorating the boxes-done by the kids.


Filling the bags...


Weighing the bags...


Sealing the bags...


And, decorating boxes...


The whole group