Feed My Starving Children: Grace Church event takes on the hunger of the world

• Tweet
• 

More than 500 community members and students converged on Grace Church over the weekend to make 100,000 meals for children in third world countries.

Grace Church brought Feed My Starving Children, a Chicago-based company, to lead the project.

There were six sessions between Saturday and Sunday, attended by people from across Mount Pleasant. Girl scouts, Zeta Theta Pi sorority, CMU’s school of music, Campus Crusade for Christ members, and people all over the community and other all joined in to volunteer their time.

“It’s very humbling and really puts things into perspective,” Bill Hahn said. “It’s a blessing to be a part off.”

The Mount Pleasant resident was there with his two children, Katie, 6, and Ben, 10.

While Bill and Ben were assembling the boxes, Katie was carrying the empty boxes to the tables for them to be filled.

“I am excited to do this, its fun,” Katie said.

The food came in a semi truck from Chicago to the church, 1217 S. Mission St. The meals were assembled in bags and put in boxes, 36 bags go into 1 box, enough to make 216 meals, said Aileen Morrissey who is a part of the Feed My Starving Children program. After all the food is boxed up it is shipped back to Chicago and then sent out to a third world country.

The packages of food are full of protein, vitamins and minerals, she said. They are made of rice and soy with different combinations of flavorings, similar to flavored rice that you buy in any normal grocery store.

Their were four different station groups that made an assembly line to make the bags of food and then putting them in the shipment boxes. If someone wasn’t a part of the assembly line they were refilling items and making boxes or labeling bags.

“We save money be adding sticker labels to the bags instead of buying the bags with the label already on them,” Morrissey said. “The food tastes good and it should taste good; just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has to taste cheap.”