Turns out that it doesn’t take that much time to prepare meals for 10,000 people in some of the most impoverished areas of the world. Ninety minutes, to be exact, when you have dozens of students, faculty and alumni teaming up on a warm fall morning as part of the Stop Hunger Now project.
Organized through the Kernodle Center for Service Learning, which celebrates this year its 20th anniversary on campus, volunteers worked just hours before the Homecoming football game on Nov. 8 filling plastic bags with high-protein, dehydrated rice-soy meals that contain vitamins and nutrients.
The project was put together to coincide with the return of EV! and Kernodle Center alumni at Homecoming.
“It was a great opportunity for us to invite the whole campus to participate in a service event at Homecoming,” said Mary Morrison, director of the Kernodle Center. “We had a nice group of people that ranged in age from 5 to 60.”
Volunteers poured rice and other ingredients into the bags using measuring cups and a funnel. Once sealed, other workers loaded the bags into boxes, which will soon be delivered to Haiti and Guatemala. Both countries have been affected by storms in recent months.
Reports of people in those nations eating dirt, or “mud cookies,” jolted the Elon volunteers, Morrison said. A representative of the nonprofit Stop Hunger Now was in attendance to teach volunteers how they were helping others.
“It was not what I expected. When I was told we’d be packaging 10,000 meals, I thought we’d be making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and that an hour and a half wouldn’t be enough,” said Elon junior Carmen Isaac, a public administration major from College Park, Md. “The best part was seeing the different people that helped us out. We had faculty and their children there, my sister was there – even a student’s parent was there.”
Morrison said she hopes to make the Stop Hunger Now project an annual event. For more information on the organization, click on the link to the right of this page.