Help For Haiti Event
Our Families Contribution
This past Saturday our family was lucky enough to be able to go to the Frank Jones Center in Portsmouth NH to help package 100,000 meals for Haiti.
The event was brought to New England by Help For Haiti. Help For Haiti is a Christian 501c3 specifically designed to feed and educate children in the northeast area of Haiti while building companies and potential jobs for their future. This is a company that is investing in Haiti's future as well as today's. To see photos from the field, click here. They dont' just want to educate these children, but to motivate and give them something to strive for. Talk about teaching a man to fish.....
The event itself was put on by Feed My Starving Children which is also another Christian non profit organization. They focus on feeding starving children in 70 countries. Hearing how they got started was very interesting. Pillsbury and other companies in MN would throw out food they thought customers would not purchase. FMSC would take this food and deliver it to starving children. After a while they were asked to stop. The food they were sending was actually making the children sick because their bodies were so severly malnourished it couldn't handle the highly processed food. That's when they decided to put together something different to help them. They came up with the bags of food which include chicken stock (like boulion), dried veggies, soy, and rice. These bags have saved lives!
For one day we got to help pack these bags. All of the bags that are sent across the world are hand packed by volunteers. There is no manufacturing plant with machinery somewhere. Also over 90% of all the donations they receive goes into the product (I can't remember the exact number). When we were packing they didn't want to waste ANY of the ingredients. For example if two scoops of veggies was added to the bag, instead of wasting those indredients, they would be mixed back into the rice box. They had it all planned out, it went very smooth and they made it so much fun! During our day we had live music put on by Bethany Church.
My kids loved it! They loved the fact that they were helping kids in another country. I love the fact that they don't mind children volunteers. I think the minimum age to help is 5. The goal for the day was to pack 100,000 meals which would be enough for a school of kids in Marmalade for one meal a day for a year. We did great and packed 107,000 meals!!!!
There is still fund raising going on to be able to ship these pallets of food to Haiti. They are about half way to their goal and would love any donations that you could give to help get the food to it's destiantion by visiting HelpForHaiti.com and click on donate.
One picture they showed moved me. It was of a tiny boy who was skin and bones and on the edge of life. Another picture was shown of the same child after being given this food. It was a transformation that brings tears to your eyes when you realize that it only took 24 cents a day to feel this child and nurse him back to health.
There is a possibility that there will be more packing events in New Hampshire. One in particular for Rochester. My kids are already to clear their calendar to participate again!
2013 UPDATE:
Upcoming packing event on Saturday, May 18th in Portsmouth at the Frank Jones Center. To sign up log on to Bethanychurch.com.
