Kids Against Hunger captures the imaginations and energies of elementary students
Published: December 16, 2005
Students at Walker-Hackensack-Akeley Elementary are old hands when it comes to food shelf food drives, collecting box tops and milk jug caps, and other fund-raising activities.
But the recent Kids Against Hunger (KAH) project had a very literal “hands-on” component that made it unique.
Dec. 6 in the old wrestling room, students, teachers, aides and parents, wearing aprons, hair nets and plastic gloves, lined up on either side of long tables covered with plastic bins, scoops, funnels, scales and bags.
Working in teams of five or six, they carefully scoop the correct amount of dry ingredient from each bin, pour it through a funnel and into the plastic bag.
Rice. Soy flour. Mixed dried vegetables. Powdered chicken flavoring. Sweet dairy whey. They weigh the package, send it to be heat-sealed, then put it in a large box.
The filled cartons are destined for locations in United States and overseas, where the packets will be cooked to feed starving kids.
Feeding Children International (FCI), Kids Against Hunger’s parent organization, distributes the meal packets in 32 countries and in the United States.
For more than 20 years, FCI has had one simple mission: to provide highly-nutritious meals to malnourished children around the world to improve both their physical health and their mental capacity to learn.
“When you feed a child, you feed our future,” declares Kids Against Hunger’s brochure.
After last year’s southeast Asia tsunami, more than 2 million meals went to affected countries. This year, more than 1 million meals were sent to U.S. states hard-hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Mark Waller, coordinator of Kids Against Hunger, Park Rapids, oversaw the operation at WHA.
The recipe, he explained, was developed by food scientists from General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.
After studying what malnourished children around the world were missing in their diets, the scientists created a recipe that would be accepted by all cultures and could be prepared quickly and simply.
Dump the dry ingredients into a pot. Add 6 to 10 cups of boiling water, cook for 20 minutes over a fire, and you get a hot, nutritious and tasty meal.
The recipe also can be enriched or adapted to local tastes and traditions by adding meat, other vegetables, herbs and spices.
Because volunteers assemble the packets and also donate money to buy ingredients, the cost per meal is only 23 cents. WHA students were asked to bring $1 to help defray costs, including shipping.
“FCI has done this long enough that it can see how improved nutrition makes a difference in the health of kids who receive those meals,” Waller remarked.
WHA students viewed a 15-minute video about FCI that showed the dire physical conditions of malnourished kids; a fact that made a big impression on many.
Second-grade teacher Mary Paskvan organized the Kids Against Hunger effort at WHA. She attends Faith Baptist Church in Park Rapids, where Waller is an assistant pastor.
“I do this on the side,” he explained with a smile.
It’s not just schools and churches that volunteer to help, but also civic groups, senior citizen clubs, scout troops and families. In the next few days, Waller would be heading to stops in Perham and Bemidji.
Interestingly, most recipe ingredients come from the Midwest. Dried vegetables come from Fosston, Minn. The powdered chicken base is made in Rogers, Minn. The soy product is manufactured by a Cargill facility in Iowa.
As for rice, “We buy it in bulk, wherever we can get it cheaply,” Waller said. “We tell folks, ‘Whenever you get to Sam’s Club, buy rice!”
At the end of the day, Paskvan reported that students had filled 59 cartons. At 216 packets per box, this means they filled 12,744 food packets.
The cartons will be part of a shipment of 250,000 meals that soon will be shipped by freighter to the African country of Malawi. An anonymous benefactor is paying the $6,000 in shipping costs.
To learn more visit www.feedingchildren .com
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: