Volunteers pay to work for food

Nearly 80 volunteers from 10 Newton area churches got together Sunday afternoon to form a production line for the creation of food packages for starving people around the world.

Ron Helms, local organizer of the Kids Against Hunger campaign, said the program was started by a wealthy entrepreneur who saw the plight of starving people in Haiti and decided to send them food. He found that the food he sent was making them sick, so he began a program with Archer Daniels Midland, Kellogg’s, Cargill and Pillsbury to create a package of easily digestible and nourishing food. What he came up with was a package of soy, rice, dried vegetables and vitamins and minerals, which, when added to six cups of boiling water, will make six meals for 25 cents each.

Helms said he was looking for an outreach program for St. Stephen’s mission to help others, when he found this, and decided it was “too big a deal” for St. Stephen’s parishioners to handle by themselves, so he took the idea to the Newton Ministerial Association.

The Newton Ministerial Association sponsored the packaging session Sunday afternoon, and volunteers paid $30 each for a 45-minute session of packaging the food products into six-meal packages, producing nearly 12,000 packages during the afternoon. The Ministerial Association will decide where the packages will go, but Helms said they are destined for either Haiti or Nicaragua.

Helms said the program was vital because there are 840 million people in the world who are currently starving to death, with approximately 153 million of those under the age of five.

“It’s so easy. For 25 cents, you can feed a starving kid,” Helms said. “I can’t imagine anyone walking away from this not and saying, ‘Wow, I really did something today.’”

Helms said the Newton Ministerial Association plans to make the Kids Against Hunger program a quarterly event, and anticipated many more area churches, as well as other charitable organizations would be participating at the next packaging date on Feb. 28, 2010.

“We’re going to need twice the space we had today,” Helms said.

John Jennings can be contacted at 792-3121 ext. 425 or via e-mail at jjennings@newtondailynews.com.