Elementary Kids 'Feed My Starving Children' December 28th, 2005

The kids are on Christmas break from school and moms and dads are home to care for them. Sledding, movies, games and travel are standard fare. Some SJA elementary students, with mom or dad, spent a couple of hours of their vacation working on an assembly line. No child labor laws were broken and the kids actually enjoyed it. The work was the brainchild of Catherine Gillis, SJA mom and Sunday School teacher.

On December 28th over 40 Joan of Arcers, young and old, packaged meals to be sent to kids across the world at the Feed My Starving Children plant in Eagan. Catherine Gillis, with the help of Religious Ed director Kathy Itzin, organized the morning event which began and ended at the Parish Center. Kathy reminded the children before they left that they were doing the important work of charity to those less needy. She also suggested that charity is not enough; as Christians we also need to work for justice in a world that too often is divided into the haves and the have nots. This same message was reinforced by the employees at FMSC(Feed My Starving Children) when we arrived. A congenial host named George talked about how people need to care for their basic survival before they can began to lift themselves out of oppressive poverty.

According to FMSC, 40,000 children, like these in Haiti, die from starvation each day in the world.

George and Michelle of FMSC explained how one cup of the meal we would be creating would satisfy a starving child for a day. They described how the stomach of a starving child had shrunk and how larger amounts of food as well as certain products such as meat would not be digestible and be wasted. The meal we would create, a chicken flavored rice-a-roni type product, was specially formulated by food scientists from Cargill and General Mills and has been very well received overseas, as well as by the SJA kids who rushed back for seconds of the sampler cups we were offered.

Feed My Starving Children began in 1987 as a project of a Minneapolis businessman during a humanitarian visit to Honduras. He returned to the Twin Cities and used the resources of his manufacturing company to explore a method of large-scale relief. After an acceptable food product was created, a manufacturing system that was low cost and efficient needed to be put in place. The work that we did in the Eagan plant could be done by a machine, but the machines would add a cost to the production that would decrease the return for the dollar. Plus, as George told us, the machine wouldn’t package any love with the food product. The ‘machine’ that would provide high efficiency and packages of love was you and I, the volunteers of the Twin Cities area.

Both the Eagan plant and the original Brooklyn Park factory run about 4-5 two hour shifts of volunteers packaging on a six day a week basis. Our shift produced over nine thousand servings of food in our shift and we were mostly rookies, new to the assembly process. Many groups come back on a regular basis. Most prevalent volunteers include churches, schools and corporations although I saw several pictures on the wall of kids who chose to have their birthday party packaging food. Each shift uses a maximum of 40 volunteers staffing 4 assembly pods. Other volunteers work in the warehouse refilling bins of food product, moving boxes and labeling bags. When everyone gets into the rhythm it is a fun-filled beehive of activity.

The product is assembled by taking a prescribed amount of chicken/vitamin powder, adding a medium scoop of dehydrated vegetables, a large scoop of both rice and protein-rich soy product. The package is weighed by another volunteer, sealed by yet another and loaded into boxes for shipping. Our SJA kids took turns trying different jobs although several parents enjoyed stereotyping individual kids as ‘soy boy’, ‘our chicken chick’ or ‘veggie boy’. Adults truly seemed to have as much fun as the kids. It was also fun to watch the parents step back and let the kids be in charge, taking ownership for their work and charity.

Jeff Rholl, father of 'vegie boy' and 'bag-a-muffin', has been a parishioner at SJA for over 10 years. He teaches science and communications technology at an area high school and organizes the SJA website in his spare time.

At the end of the morning we returned to the Parish Office for pizza provided by Kathy Itzin. Kathy mentioned that the elementary age kids have not been involved in as many service projects as the youth groups have, partially due to staffing shortages, but that if parents wished to step up and organize such events she would gladly support them. As we explore the duality of charity and justice, it seems to me that the elementary aged kids may not always grasp the intricacies of justice movements but they can easily and enthusiastically wrap their hands around charity. I am very thankful to belong to a parish that recognizes the need for both charity and justice and provides teachable moments to discuss them with my children.

Feed My Starving Children has a website, www.fmsc.org, where you can sign up to package food, read more about the program, or offer o