Volunteer Project

By Reed Schares

            For my volunteer project, I went to West Presbyterian church in Waterloo. We helped the organization of Feed My Starving Children, from 5-7 p.m. It’s an organization that gets food for starving children in countries including Haiti. When we first got to the church we sat down and watched a video on Haiti and the people’s living conditions. I learned from that video that these people lived in dumps and had to use whatever they had to survive. One food they can get is mud pies. They get mud and dry it in the sun, to eat it so it will help the kids go to sleep with something in their stomachs. The video was sad and informational. We learned that since the kids haven’t eaten anything in months, so the FMSC made a food that well go down easily and be filling to the kids. The bottom layer of the food was chicken powder, next was vegetables, soy, then rice. The package can feed up to 6 kids. You just pour the bag in a pot and boil everything. After the video we went in this area and they taught us how to pack the food in. Step number one was get the bag and put it on the funnel. Number two was to put the food in the bag in order. Next we had to weigh the package. It had to be between 380-400 grams. Anytime you would get too much you’d scoop some of the rice out and get it at the right weight. Anytime you were on 390 grams you would have to yell BINGO!!! This kid and I had a fight to see who could yell it the loudest. Jerret and I won, we owned him. Jerret and I were in the same group we both did the weighing and the bags. We got to wear hair nets, it was cool. There are 20 bags in each box, are group made 27 boxes, so that’s 540 bags of food. All the groups together we had over 16,000 bags of food. We worked for 2 hours. It was actually a lot fun, because we worked together in an assembly line and it was fun because we had to stay in pace with everyone so we have enough bags made. At the end the FMSC guy told us how much we produced and what a good job we did. I learned that volunteering is fun, something to do, a chance to work with other people, and help people that really need things in life. 

I would like feed back on anything.