On Saturday, i had the privilege to volunteer with Stop Hunger. Now. A group from work had organized a meal packaging session and raised enough money to package over 10,000 meals.
What a great organization. Their attitude can be expressed in the way they prefer to refer to their packing warehouse – a sharehouse. It’s awesome.
I learned a lot about hunger in the world. One billion people (a full sixth of the world’s population) suffer from hunger. That’s a staggeringly large number considering i just threw away some leftovers. One of the most common ways they feed people is by sponsoring school feeding programs. This has some interesting effects:
- Parents are incented to send their children to school, when they otherwise may not have. Thus literacy rates and education levels are increasing.
- When girls are sent to school, even just to middle school level, the number of children they have decreases significantly. We were told that an average uneducated woman (i’m assuming in a 3rd world country) has 8-9 children in her lifetime (!), but when she has just a middle school education, the number decreases to 2-3. Wow. This should eventually have an effect on population.
It’s very cool that this group can make an immediate difference in hunger and also see some other positive effects rippling out.
The process was pretty interesting.
Station 1 was where the ingredients were bagged. Soy, rice, dried vegetables and a protein pellet all went into a plastic bag. One volunteer manned each ingredient and one manned the bag. The bag is placed under the funnel and all the ingredients are tossed into the funnel. Once we had a binful of bagged meals, a runner would grab the bin and take it to the next station. This was really simple, and the assembly-line nature of it with all the volunteers (we had about 25 show up) makes it possible to really bag a lot of meals quickly.
Station 2 was the weighing and sealing station. Each meal from the previous station is weighed, and rice is added or subtracted until it falls within a certain weight range. Then the sealers have a device that clamps down and heats the plastic to seal it.
Station 3 is the boxing station, where the sealed bags are packed into boxes that are ready to ship.
There are also volunteers running around replenishing ingredients if necessary, so the quick-packing assembly line is never interrupted.
We packed over 5,000 meals in 90 minutes, and another shift did the rest. I’m told groups of kindergardeners have also done this, so it’s not hard. It just takes a little time and perhaps a small donation. But it was certainly a way to contribute in a small way to the world’s problems.
I’m signed up on their mailing list now, and hope to participate in other packing events.