Kansans Pack Food for Haitian Schoolchildren (Dec. 2009)

December 29, 2009

By Rebecca Gannon

(EL DORADO, Kan.)

The United Nations estimates 25,000 people die from starvation every day. That's the equivalent of 71 full 747 airplanes crashing daily.

Reporter Video: Rebecca Gannon on El Dorado Help for Haiti

While it may sound like a daunting number, but a Kansas organization is taking on the challenge to shrink that number, one scoop at a time.

The group started packing boxes on Tuesday. It will continue through 8 pm Wednesday. It hopes to have enough meals packed to fill a 40 x 6 foot shipping container by the end of 2009.

Keeping with the beat of the Caribbean music pounding through the speakers, volunteers scoop, fill, and seal bags of food.

"We're packing up food to send to Haiti," explained volunteer Christy Pray.

The food will go to children these 200 volunteers have never met, and probably never will meet.

"I'm here because I thought it would be a good time to spend some time with my friends," said Rachel Sheldon, a teenager taping up a box full of food bags. "Plus we're helping a lot of hungry people," she added.

At the tables in the El Dorado Civic Center, age and height don't matter. Children stand on step stools beside their parents, because filling bags with 44,000 pounds of food matters.

The food comes from a distributor in Iowa. The meals consist of a vitamin pill, a cup of soy, a cup of rice, and a scoop of freeze dried vegetables. All that goes into one bag.

Each bag holds 6 meals. 36 bags go in a shipping box. That's 216 meals for Haitian school children. In 15 minutes Tuesday afternoon, volunteers made 5,000 meals.

"So many children in Haiti are starving," explained Pray. "This is a way they can go and they can get an education and food at the same time."

It's all for the non-profit Numana, a play on the biblical word for food, manna.

And it's all the work of Rick McNary, who says a five year old girl he met on a mission trip inspired his dream to fill 285,125 meals in two days.

"She asked me to feed her," he remembered, "because she was hungry. It broke my heart. And it changed my life, and I decided from that point on -- to do everything I could within my power to feed starving people."

Numana, Inc. partnered with the Salvation Army World Service Office. The organization will then deliver the meals to schools. McNary gave the example of one village school: enrollment sits at 400, but daily attendance hovers near 100. He said most students spend their days looking for food, not concentrating on an education.

The group is also concerned with helping hungry Kansans. There are two large bins sitting in the hallway by Numana's packing room. McNary hopes to collect four tons in non-perishable food donations for local, Kansas food banks.

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