Thousands of volunteers pack meals for malnourished children

Editor's note: The story has been edited for updates and to clarify the number of volunteers.

More than 400 volunteers packed into the Osage Centre in Cape Girardeau during a Sunday afternoon shift to help prepare food to send to starving nations.

La Croix United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau has been hosting the Feed My Starving Children volunteer event since 2009, and organizer Linda Watts said each year, it gets larger.

La Croix contracts with the larger Feed My Starving Children charity for a certain amount of food each year. But if there's any left over, they don't stop packing until it's all ready to ship.

Last year, they packed 850,000 meals. The total Sunday night was more than 948,000, packed by more than 3,600 volunteers.

A team including Kennedy Lewis, left, Anne-Marie Ritter, Lauren LaMar, Sydne Newman and Ava LaMar fill MannaPacks at the Feed My Starving Children MobilePack event Sunday at the Osage Centre in Cape Girardeau. (Fred Lynch)

"That means 2,534 kids that will eat a meal every day for a year," Watts said of the preliminary total packed during the weekend.

Volunteers manned assembly lines at 40 filling stations situated around the gymnasium, measuring, pouring, weighing, sealing and boxing meals of rice, soy, vegetables and vitamins. Volunteers came from all corners of the community. Some were La Croix parishioners such as Jessica McGinty, but many more weren't, such as the co-workers McGinty had persuaded to help out.

"We're teachers at Jefferson Elementary," she said while operating a heat-sealer on the assembly line. "[La Croix] does a lot to help us, so we thought this would be a good way to repay the church."

Southeast Missouri State University's football, tennis, gymnastics and soccer teams participated as well.

"As it's grown over the years, people have found out about it, and groups call us now," Ron Watts said. "We don't really recruit anymore."

"The meal itself was developed by food scientists at the University of Minnesota," said La Croix pastor Ron Watts.

The vegetarian meals don't get tied up in cultural taboo, he said. Plus they last longer.

Each meal costs roughly 22 cents, but that adds up fast when you're boxing it over the course of three days, even though a local farmer -- who insists on anonymity -- donates the rice every year.

"We have to pay for the food, and that's usually a bigger question than can we get it packed," Linda said, explaining La Croix funds much of the event on parishioners' donations.

"We step out on faith," she said, referring to the La Croix Christmas Eve offering, where congregants are challenged to match what they spent on gifts with a charity donation.

"The first time we did this [in 2009] was when the market had crashed, and we thought, 'Oh gosh, this might have been a bad time to start this,'" Watts said.

But in the first year alone, they raised $150,000.

According to Linda Watts, the charitable act becomes more meaningful when it requires a weekend of work, rather than just a writing a check.

"When you do something with your hands, it gives you a vested interest in it." she said. "It brings it home and makes it personal."

The volunteers take the food all the way from ingredients to ship-ready pallets, which Watts said is the next-closest thing to physically serving someone a much-needed meal.

"Because it's real. It's real that people are starving all over the world," she said. "And it's hard to say, 'Jesus loves you, but you can't have any food.' [This event] is about becoming the hands about becoming the hands and feet of Christ."

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627