The Meal Marathon

On Saturday, January 31st, our family was part of a wonderful Meal Packing Marathon.  What is that, you ask?  Well, our church, Bellevue Presbyterian, hosted a two-hour event where over 300 people packed dried meals for kids in Africa.  The entire event was sponsored by Children of the Nations, which is the non-profit where I have volunteered for the last several years.  So,  I have helped to plan this event for the last few months, working with two other great women at the church.

So, early in the morning, a big truck pulled up in front of the church, full of supplies to unload.  Our family was part of the early set-up crew, and the kids were fabulous workers.  We set up 28 stations, each of which had the dried food, funnel, and scales to help bag and weight the meals.  We chanted “lentils, spice, chicken, rice” as teams of 8-10 people worked at each table to fill plastic bags with the food.  Someone would then weigh the bags to ensure they were in the correct 390-400 gram range.  (Hailey was very good at that!)  Then kids from each table would run the food bags to a “sealing” station, where the bags would be sealed shut, and then put into boxes. 

The whole morning was awesome.  We had fun music playing, and the room was full of energy.  Kids everywhere were helping their parents with the various tasks.  I had so many people comment that they loved having an opportunity to do a service project with their kids.  Altogether, we packaged 70,000 meals!  It was so fabulous!  Children of the Nations then takes these boxes of dried food, loads them into a huge container, which then will be shipped to Sierra Leone in West Africa where they have a feeding program. 

Our kids were super mature and happy helpers the whole day.  They were part of the set-up crew, the working crew, and the clean-up crew.  So, they deserved the lunch at Panera Bread afterward!