Feed My Starving Children

Are you familiar with the "Feed My Starving Children" (FMSC) Organization?  It's a Christian, non-profit organization that hand packs meals for malnourished children in over 70 countries.... to date...   Here's a link to their website.  The organization depends on the kindness of people to donate funds for the supplies  as well as volunteers to help package the food.  

This is the second time I've volunteered to pack food.  Not only is it a worthwhile experience, but it's fun too.  Last week we had my parents, both my sisters, my daughter, my niece and myself as a group to go help.  That day the group was packaging food for Uganda.

FMSC is well organized.  They schedule the food packing for 2 hour windows throughout the day.  Lots of school groups come in and volunteer their time.  I have to say, the kids really seem to enjoy doing it.  Here we are in our hair nets, getting ready to watch the short presentation, explaining what we were going to be doing and how the food packs are eventually used....

After scrubbing our hands, we're all sent off to the packing tables.  Each table has a country name and ours was Peru.

All the food is set up in large bins.  It consists of dehydrated veggies, rice, soy and vitamins.

Everyone circles the table and gets a job.  Some people scoop the food, some open the plastic packs and hold them under the funnels, some weigh the packages, another person heat seals the packs, another person counts the packs and loads the boxes with 36 packets.  Once a box is filled, the table shouts out a collective cheer and does a little dance while a runner comes over and grabs the box.   Then we start all over.

 Every 10 minutes or so we'd switch jobs so everyone got a chance to do something different...

 They pipe in music over the loud speakers and everyone dances and sings along.

These are the packets lined up on the counting table.  Once we collected 36 of them, they get scooped into a box...

And this is what a full bag of packed food looks like....

For the 2 hours that we packed food, this is what our whole group (about 6 tables of people) accomplished.  Pretty amazing, isn't it?

This is what the packaged food looks like when it's cooked...

Visit FMSC here.