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On a separate mission trip with Gehlen students, a group of senior boys tried to share food with an eight-year-old boy who had been helping on a water project. But the little boy said he couldn’t take the food because “it wasn’t his day to eat.” The little boy pointed to his sister and said, “Give it to her. She needs it more than I do.”
“Stories like that made me want to do more,” Richard said. In 2005, a group of volunteers brought an organization called Kids Against Hunger to Le Mars Gehlen Catholic School. In their first effort, students, teachers, parents and other supporters packed 260,000 meals in 12 hours. “After two years, I got some of my friends together and we started to build our own program. Mother Theresa once said, ‘If you can’t feed 100 people, then feed just one.’ I thought those four words – ‘Then Feed Just One’ – encapsulated everything I firmly believe as a human being. No child should have to go to bed hungry.”
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THOUSANDS OF MEALS AT 17.5 CENTS EACH
Then Feed Just One has grown into a mobile food packaging program which delivers life-saving nutritious meals for starving children and their families. The organization purchases the ingredients for a simple food mixture, which includes rice from Missouri and Arkansas; and, from Minnesota, soy, freeze dried vegetables, and a powder of minerals and vitamins needed in the bodies of children who are malnourished and hungry. The ingredients, packaging and other materials are brought by the organization to various schools, churches, clubs and communities who do the mixing and packaging. Each group pays for the number of meals they package – the 17.5 cents per meal they pay covers the cost of the food ingredients, packaging and the complicated shipping process. In addition to the immediate area, Then Feed Just One has coordinated packaging events in cities such as Rapid City, Fort Dodge, and Carroll. But every single effort makes a difference. “During the pandemic, I had two one-person packing teams. They wanted to pack food, so I set up a table for them out here and they packed. One of them packed a box of 216 meals. It cost her $37.80 to feed 216 children. That’s what it’s all about.”
Because the administration of Then Feed Just One is done all by volunteers, the 17.5 cents per meal is about half the cost of other organizations doing similar services. One 13.8 ounce bag of food is the equivalent of six meals. The numbers start to become staggering from there … 36 bags to a box; 66 boxes on a pallet which equals 14,256 meals per pallet. Twenty-three full pallets were in the warehouse on May 1st; equaling a total of 373,888 meals. Often there are more than half a million meals in the warehouse.
Empty 40-foot refer trailers which hauled Dole bananas north to the U.S. haul the food packages to Honduras via Mississippi to Florida to Guatemala to Cortez, Honduras and then to Puerto Castilla. He said their connection with the Ancient
Malnutrition threatens the health and lives of many Hondurans.
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