Stop Hunger Now

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of participating in an amazing service-learning-awareness-raising-world-changing-social-action-relief project. And it was awesome.

The organization Stop Hunger Now came to our church to help us with a food packing event. 900+ volunteers gathered over the course of about seven hours to package over 165,000 meals that were then sent to East Africa for famine relief. The more I read about Stop Hunger Now, the more I like them. Here are some of their FAQs.

I got to participate with the middle and high school students for the first two shifts. My words here won't do justice to the 150 middle school and 200 high school students that gave their morning working hard to package meals for people they'll never meet on the other side of the world.

If you've never heard of Stop Hunger Now or don't know about the children around the world that die every six seconds from hunger, take a look at this short video.



The students were spread out all over a huge room in our church.
(Click on this image to see it full-sized.)

In the front of the room there were long tables with stations of 5-man teams. Each person was responsible for adding one ingredient to a bag - vitamins, dried veggies, soy protein and rice. Then they put the bag in a bin.

After they had completed a number of bags, a runner would come and get their bin and take it to a weighing station where another volunteer would make sure each bag was the correct weight by adding or subtracting rice.

Then the bags went to a sealing station where they were heat sealed.

Runners would then take the bags to the packaging station where they were counted, packaged and sealed for shipment.

The boxes were stacked on carts by strong volunteers with mega endurance.

Finally the boxes were taken outside and loaded into the back of a truck.

Each bag of food serves six people and every time 1,000 meals were packaged one of us would get to ring a huge gong and everyone in the room would shout and cheer. Yes, I was this excited when it was my turn to ring the gong.

Everyone had a lot of fun and we all felt like we actually did something to help, something hands on and active. And, even though everyone had to wear hair nets, there were smiles all around.

For more information on how you can make a difference, click here.

I am really excited to do this again because, according to their website, children as young as five are able to participate. And you can bet my kids will be doing this one as soon as I can make it happen.