LaCroix Church to pack 750,000 meals of hope

LaCroix Church in Cape Girardeau is aiming to fulfill 750,000 meals during a three-day "mobile pack" event partnered with Feed My Starving Children, Dec. 7 through 9 at the Osage Centre.

This is the tenth year for the event, but eleventh meal-packing event hosted by the church, co-directors Linda Tenkhoff, Linda Watts and Chrisy Wilferth confirmed Tuesday.

Watts, wife of LaCroix Church pastor Ron, said this event readies meals to send abroad through partnerships with local missions, to be distributed within countries where there is need for nutritional assistance.

The pre-packed meal contains rice, soy protein, dehydrated vegetables and vitamins -- all essential for proper human growth and development.

"And in that meal, a child is going to get 100 percent of their daily needs to sustain them, Wilferth said. "They get one meal a day, and they stand in line and hold these bowls like it's a treasured thing."

Volunteers file down the hall after signing in Dec. 1 during a Feed My Starving Children mobile food-packing event at the Osage Centre in Cape Girardeau.Ben Matthews ~ Southeast Missourian

Wilferth, was recently stationed in Eswatini, the Kingdom of Eswatini, known as Swaziland, within Southern Africa. She has seen first-hand the community impact of providing nutritional food through Feed My Starving Children.

"We tracked it for a year, to see if it was making a difference," she said. "What they're finding is the kids are so much stronger, they have growth spurts, they're not sick for a month from a cold, their immune system is built up ..."

She said, "A lot of these kids take HIV meds; you've got to have protein for that to work. Just so many neat things were happening, and that's just in one, tiny, little spot in Swaziland."

Tenkhoff said the program gives the children hope.

"They can't do anything if they're starving," she said. "We have hungry children here, and we may have starving children here, but these people and these children are starving."

She said after the food is packed by the more than 2,800 volunteers, no one else touches it until it arrives at its final destination.

"And we pray over it," Tenkhoff said.

Five-year volunteer Wilferth said she is confident the meals she and the other volunteers are packing are going to get where they need to be.

The places Wilferth has visited that provided the meals, she said, the locals refer to it as their "special stew."

Watts said in one location where meals were provided, according to her husband, the once-starved locals now have a garden to provide for themselves.

"If you get people to where they can actually survive, it's going to be a sustaining thing," she said. "That's what we're trying to do. ... It's not going in and putting a Band-Aid on something; it's giving them the resources that they need to make it on their own."

And the money needed to fund the project is raised after the event, along with lots of prayer along the way, too, they said.

Tenkhoff said, "We have a Christmas Eve service, we have four services, and during those services, all the offering goes to pay for this food."

She said in years past, with that donation, they have "never had a problem because we're doing what Jesus calls us to do."

"Over the 10 years, we have packed over 4.5 million meals," Watts said. "We do missions locally, and this is our mission globally."

Those interested in participating during the meal-packing event are to contact LaCroix Church in Cape Girardeau.

jhartwig@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3632