Packing Food for Kids Against Hunger

As soon as I watched a video clip of people packing food for Kids Against Hunger in church a few weeks ago, I knew that it would be a great experience for our family, so I signed us up to help pack food at a sister church on the other side of town last Saturday.  Unfortunately, it ended up that Dr. Peds had to work and couldn’t join us, but we were super blessed to have friends willing to watch Mr. Trouble on Feet so that we could go and help.

The big kidlets were happy to come and help even though they didn’t really have a concrete idea of what they were going to be doing, no matter how much I tried to explain.  Kids Against Hunger is an organization that sends packets of food to staving children around the world.  Local communities raise  money, and then come together to pack many boxes filled with food packets that are distributed to extremely hungry kids, mostly overseas.  Each packet contains a special mixture of protein, dehydrated vegetables, rice and soy that can be prepared with water, and each bag feeds six people.  On Saturday three shifts of people in different churches and from different community organizations came together to pack food to feed 75,000 people.

We were divided into different teams at tables to create an assembly line that measured and poured, weighed and sealed the bags of food that were then packed into boxes to be shipped to The Philippines. Most of the people working our “shift” were grown ups, but our family ended up working with two other families from our church and one other family we didn’t know.  We were a table filled to the brim with lots of helpful kids, and while we were certainly not the most efficient assembly line (and we did spill a bit more than some of the other tables) my heart was filled with a lot of joy working next to kids I have seen and taught in Sunday School over the last few years, watching them  and my own kids so invested in what they were doing.

I knew my kids were going to like doing this, but I didn’t anticipate HOW much they were going to like it.  In fact, the person overseeing our table was not really a “kid friendly person,” and sometimes she actually  seemed a little (OK, maybe a lot) grumpy, but even despite that, and despite the fact that we had to carefully follow a lot of rules that didn’t really make sense to kids when we were packing the food, they had such great attitudes the whole time. They worked really hard at their task in the assembly line.  They talked about where the food was going, and what the people might be doing who were going to eat it. They were excited to be helping.  As soon as we finished, they grinned and asked if they could PLEASE, please, please do this again next year.  We will definitely be making it a priority as long as we have the opportunity.