for the least of these....

so this past week at southland we were able to take part in packaging meals for starving people in 3rd world countries--it was awesome! we partnered with a group call Feed My Starving Children. they developed this packaged meal with vegetarian chicken flavoring with added vitamins and minerals (kinda like a supped up ramon noodle packet!), dehydrated veggies, soy protein, and rice. the meal is literally made to provided the nutritional needs for people who are truly starving. one package contains enough food to feed 6 people for a day, since their stomachs are so small they don't need very much but it also contains all the nutritional content they need for the day, it's just not filler! each meal cots 17 cents and our goal was to fill over a million meals, and we did! apparently we beat any records FMSC had had in the past, which is awesome. we ended up filling 1,056,024 meals! and what i thought was really cool is throughout the week when we got a truck load filled they went ahead and just sent that out to make it way to people in need. FMSC partners with other ministries and missionaries to help meet their needs for feeding the people they minister to. they told us this story once that a missionary who used their food told them; this family got a box of food, which would probably be enough food to feed them for a month or so and the family sat there and opened every bag and fingered through it and sat it aside. and the missionary was just confused, so he asked why so they told him it was because they had never gotten a donation of rice that didn't have rocks in it as well. that's just awful. i was so thankful to be able to give up a few hours of my time and some cash to help package and provide meals for those less fortunate than myself. i couldn't even image what it would be like to not be able to eat, even when i don't have much food it's so much more.

*Update...here are all the totals....

1,056,024 meals were packed
4,889 boxes
4,995 volunteers over the course of 1 week
2,893 Kids will eat for a YEAR