Stop Hunger Now by Frank Anastasi

On Saturday my son and I took part in a most amazing effort. About 80 people packed 27,500 meals, which will feed starving school children in places like Haiti, in about two hours. How could this be? >Stop Hunger Now has a system that rivals the most efficient assembly line in any auto plant, that’s how. The organization gets volunteers to pack millions of meals it sends all over the world to feed starving school-age children.

Here’s how it happened. One young man arrived at Christ Episcopal Church in a large truck filled with 50 pound bags of rice, granulated soy protein, and dried vegetables this morning. He also had a dozen or so five-gallon pails of chicken flavored multi-vitamins about half the size of a golf ball. And 4,584 small, plastic bags.

Teams of five people used a standing wire rack, a funnel, and various sized plastic cups to fill each bag with the prescribed amounts of the dried food. Runners (and did we run!) shuttled small pails of filled bags from each team to weigh stations, and returned empty pails to the filling teams. Weighers weighed each bag and added or subtracted some rice so each bag met the target weight. Sealers then sealed each bag with a heating press. Packers then packed the sealed bags in boxes ready for shipment. Sustainers replenished each team’s supplies of dried food as they emptied their supply bins filling the bags.

It was the best kind of organized chaos you’ve ever seen! People yelling “Runner!” “Rice!” “Bins! We need more bins!” “Got Soy?” Slip-sliding on spilled rice underfoot. And the best – the SHN guy banging a gong when we’d hit our first thousand meals, then at five thousand, and again and again, on up to the finale. It was crazy, and so much fun.

We started getting organized and receiving instruction on what to do around 10:00 am. By 12:30, the last bags were packed. A little clean up and a lot of shaking of hands, and we were done.

So, think about it. When water is added to the food that goes into each bag and it’s boiled, you have six servings of a pretty tasty chicken-flavored rice and vegetable casserole. So you see, six times 4,584 equals about 27,500 meals! Considering that things like mud cookies (lard mixed with, yes, mud) are a staple of many starving children, it’s easy to see the huge impact that 80 people working feverishly for two hours — and having a blast every minute — will have combating starvation around the world.

You can get in on this action, too. We were told that Christ Episcopal was the first church in Maryland to do this. Want to go next? Look up Stop Hunger Now, or contact me and I will help you find them. Happy Thanksgiving!

Frank Anastasi

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