Labor of love: Church gears up for annual food-packing event

This weekend, 3,200 volunteers are expected to fill 800,000 bags with food to help children in famine-affected areas, event organizers said Wednesday.

For the sixth year in a row, LaCroix Church is hosting a Feed My Starving Children MobilePack event at the Osage Centre in Cape Girardeau.

Members of LaCroix and other local churches donated $176,000 to buy the food, Linda Watts said.

"Each meal costs 22 cents," Watts said. "With 700,000 meals last year, we fed over 1,900 kids for an entire year. ... It'll be over 2,000 kids this year."

Watts and Linda Tenkhoff are co-coordinators for the event, which they said drew about 2,400 volunteers last year despite a snowstorm that dumped more than a foot of snow and sleet on the area.

The volunteers work assembly-line fashion to fill bags with rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and flavorings, seal the bags and pack them into boxes, Tenkhoff said.

"We yell that we have a box, and then people come over and pick it up and strap it up and tape it up," she said.

The boxes go onto trucks to be shipped to partner organizations in other countries, where the food is distributed to children in need, Tenkhoff said.

"We pay for the food, and at LaCroix, we raise the money by our Christmas Eve offering, and then we have other churches that bring people," Watts said.

McKendree United Methodist Church, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church and Fruitland Community Church all supply volunteers, Watts said, with McKendree doing a special Thanksgiving offering to raise money for the project.

"There are a lot of other people that are involved," she said.

Families save money all year to give during the special offering, sometimes finding creative ways to save, Watts and Tenkhoff said.

"We had amazing stories of families. We challenged the people here to recognize that Christmas isn't your birthday and to be equally as generous with your [charitable] giving as you are with your gifts for your family," Watts said.

One family put a bowl on the table, and at each meal, each family member put a quarter in the bowl as a reminder of what it costs to feed a child, she said. At the end of the year, the family donated all the quarters to Feed My Starving Children.

"People think about it all year long," Tenkhoff said.

Feed My Starving Children does not buy advertisements, Tenkhoff said, relying instead on word of mouth to raise awareness and public interest.

"Their overhead cost is 3 percent, so they don't waste any money on anything except what's really needed," Watts said.

The organization has distributed more than 1 billion meals, she said. Each meal is formulated to provide all of a child's daily nutritional needs.

"The meals have enough nutrition that a child gets one meal per day, but it's all the nutrition they need for the day," Watts said.

Meals are distributed according to need; for instance, many packs have been sent to areas of West Africa affected by the Ebola outbreak, Watts and Tenkhoff said.

They said participants in the church's mission trips have seen Feed My Starving Children rice packs being distributed to children in the areas they visited.

"People go, 'How do you know it gets there?' Well, we've seen it," Watts said.

In Swaziland, a small country in the southern part of Africa, children call the food "special stew," Tenkhoff said.

"They just stand in line for their 'special stew,'" she said.

Tenkhoff said volunteers will have a chance to sample the food during the event this weekend.

"It's not that bad. It's got a good flavor," she said.

Watts and Tenkhoff said volunteers are welcome, but they must preregister online for specific shifts.

"We really can't have people just walk in," Watts said.

By Wednesday night, about 125 volunteer slots remained open, mostly on the Saturday evening shift.

"This is something kids can do and feel a part," Tenkhoff said. "It's kindergarten on up that can participate."

epriddy@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

Cape Girardeau, MO

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Want to help?

Volunteers who would like to help pack food this weekend for Feed My Starving Children can visit the LaCroix Church website, lacroixchurch.org, and click on the Feed My Starving Children link to register for a shift. Anyone who would like to donate money to Feed My Starving Children can click the same link on the church's website or mail donations to:

LaCroix Church

3102 Lexington Ave.

Cape Girardeau, MO 63701