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Volunteers use teamwork to fight hunger - New Bern, NC
Monday, February 8, 2010
By: Chessney Barrick
Garber UMC packages 40,000 meals.
Sun Journal - Feb 6, 2010
Laura Oleniacz
While volunteering at a school in Haiti through a Garber United
Methodist Church mission trip, Mary Coleman said church members saw
Stop Hunger Now meal boxes at the school that are sent to feed people
in crisis situations or to children in orphanages or schools in
developing countries.
Church volunteers had helped package meals for Stop Hunger Now, and
they realized that the school’s 500 children at the time were eating
the meals twice a day in the cafeteria.
“It was like everything coming full circle to have packed (the
meals) here, and see the children eating them in those schools,”
Coleman said. “The director of the school said it makes the children
learn better if they’re not hungry.”
Volunteers returned to Garber on Saturday to package meals for Stop
Hunger Now, assembling 40,000 meals that they hope will go to people in
need in Haiti who were affected by the magnitude-7 earthquake that
struck the country Jan. 12.
Saturday’s event was the largest that church leaders have organized,
said Coleman, the church’s ministries coordinator, of the eight or nine
meal-packaging events they have held in about two years.
Volunteers from Garber and from the community worked in four
one-hour shifts to package 10,000 meals per hour, working efficiently
like bees in a hive.
Some volunteers poured scoops of rice, dehydrated vegetables, a
soy-flour mixture and vitamin tablets into a funnel, while other
volunteers held plastic bags to catch the food.
The bags were then taken to volunteers working at long tables to
weigh, seal, and then package the food into boxes. Each time the group
completed 1,000 bags, a volunteer would bang a loud gong at the front
of the room.
Lance Sellon, director of student ministries for the church, said he
had originally planned to package the meals as part of a youth group
retreat for about 45 young people.
The students were participating in the 30 Hour Famine program in
which students fundraise to help feed hungry people, and they also
pledge not to eat for 30 hours. The famine allows them to experience
hunger and also to grow in their faith, Sellon said.
But he said that the earthquake in Haiti “changed our focus.”
The youth still planned to carry out the 30 Hour Famine, but they
also opened up the meal-packaging event to the community. They set a
goal of raising $10,000 to pay for 40,000 meals. He said that 10,000
meals cost $2,500.
They met their goal, and more. He said all of the money will go to Stop Hunger Now.
Joy Cherry, youth leader at Mount Zion Holiness Church on Eubanks
Street, said there were about 20 adults and young people from her
church who came to help package the meals on Saturday.
“It’s just such a blessing to be a blessing to Haiti in their time of need,” she said.
Frances Bailey and her daughter Sarah, 9, worked together to seal
the bags of food at the table in their first time volunteering for Stop
Hunger Now.
“It’s just a good feeling: the teamwork, all the different churches
coming together,” Bailey said. “To hear that 10,000 meals in less than
an hour (were packaged) — that’s amazing.”
Iris Crawford, a member of Riverdale United Methodist Church, also
said she was volunteering for the first time for the agency. She said
she volunteered because she thought “it was a good thing to do” and was
for a “wonderful cause.”
“That’s what mankind is here for, to help others,” she said.
http://www.newbernsj.com/news/hunger-65401-church-school.html
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