Friday, October 03, 2008

Feed My Starving Children

I donated two hours of my time yesterday to stuff bags full of rice and flavor powder and rye and dried vegetables (primarily for color, I think). There were 40 of us from work and 9 other people I didn't know. We packed 24,408 meals, or 4,068 bags (6 cups/meals per bag), or 113 boxes (36 bags per box). While one cup doesn't seem like a meal, FMSC primarily targets starving people, not just malnourished, so the cup of food is enough to keep them them from getting sick on too much food after not enough until they're well enough to eat more. The food we packed will feed 67 people for a year. It's a religious organization, which is a bit weird for me, but I figured as long as I personally didn't have to pray over the pallets of food and they weren't distributing food to only card-carrying Christians, I didn't care. It's a good cause. Supposedly they'll package 64 million meals this year, and hope to reach 100 million by 2010. They opened another packaging center near Chicago to expand their operation. All in all, a good use of my two hours, despite how bending over to bag and dump cups of rice and rye made my back ache a little, and my hair smell like (vegan) chicken flavor powder. At the end, they even let us try a little cup full of the food. It needs tater tots.

Here I am in my hair net (blue shirt and dress pants) setting up food bags.


The lot of us in front of the charity. Ming's on the right (a familiar face from my blog). I'm back left (where tall guys belong).

1 comment:

BiggTree said...

See? Christians aren't all bad.