Two Little Gutt Girls: Feed My Starving Children

A few weeks ago, I had a birthday. I celebrated 32 rides around the sun – a personal record for me! For months, I’ve known what I’d wanted to do for my birthday and Loran made it happen. I’d had it on my heart that I really wanted to have my birthday party at Feed My Starving Children. And while the name seems somewhat bleak, their mission is amazing. I’d first participated in a food packing event through our church when Lillian was one week old. It really struck a chord with me and I’ve wanted to do it again. Loran organized a group to go and I was joined by fabulous friends and family and a few other groups who were eager to pack meals.

Basically, your group forms an assembly line with everyone having a job. Together you work to fill bags with measured quantities of chicken, veggies, soy and rice. The bags are weighed and sealed and boxed up. The boxes are then shipped around the globe to help feed starving and malnourished children. Some are close to death and within weeks of receiving this vitamin packed, specially formulated food ,are brought back from the brink with amazing results. Amazingly, FMSC has an amazing delivery success rate, having only lost two shipments in 20 years. Astonishing really, considering they are delivering food to some hard to reach areas in Africa, Haiti and recently Somali. Each box receives a prayer before it is shipped off – the best shipping insurance out there.

In the hour and a half of packing, our group alone packaged 17 boxes. Each box contains 36 meal pouches and each pouch feeds six. That’s 3,672 meals. As a whole, the entire shift packed up 115 boxes! Even better, that is enough to feed 69 children for an entire year! That’s a birthday I can be proud of. Thanks to everyone who came, packed, hauled boxes, donated and everyone who couldn’t come but still donated money. Shockingly, our grocery bill for the session was $5961.61. Every donation counts.

At the end of the session, our numbers were broken down, we were able to sample the prepared food (it’s quite good) and unbeknownst to me, they had the people who were there celebrating birthdays come up and introduce themselves along with what birthday they were celebrating. So there were three of us total. A ten year old girl, and eight year old girl and a 32 year old girl! It was the perfect mix of humbling/embarrassing. I was even in my party dress, because I always like to spiff myself up for my birthday celebration and I like to show the world that I can feed over 3,000 children while wearing a dress. Superwoman.

Afterwards, in an almost awkward juxtaposition when you consider what we’d just been doing, we all went out for Mexican food. We had great conversation, giant cervesa, and a very confused server.

Seriously, a great birthday!