People of all ages spent Friday evening and throughout the day Saturday last weekend packing the meals. The Meals of Hope MobilePack through Feed My Starving Children was held at City Church as part of a joint effort with City Alliance Church, both downtown Williamsport churches. An estimated 300 people volunteered over the two-day event, working for three two-hour shifts with a goal of packing 85,000 meals.

As of Monday, 82,000 had been packed with City Alliance committing to packing the remaining 3,000 at a later time, according to a source at the church.

Steve Chapple, one of the pastors at City Alliance, helped organize the packing crews.

He admitted that the hardest part of bringing it all together was finding sponsors for the $25,000 needed for the meals. The second hardest part was finding volunteers to do the packing.

“It’s just so important to, one, give people an opportunity to serve, but two, to give people an opportunity to think outside of themselves,” Chapple said.

“We live in a world that really teaches us to focus on ourselves and on our own needs, and this gives us an opportunity to think about kids around the world that have a need. Hunger is a problem all over the world. It’s even a problem in our own town, and we have resources the kids across the world don’t, and so being able to do this is just an incredible opportunity to help kids who are unhealthy and not strong get on the path to health,” he added.

Chapple said that he had met someone who works for Feed My Starving Children over a year ago and after hearing about their mission, was really excited about “what the possibilities were.”

“It just kind of took us a while to get the ball rolling and get all our ducks in a row and find a venue that we could partner with,” he said.

“I’m just hearing about all the children around the world that are starving and need food, and how simple it is to pack these rice meals. And we packed 25,000 meals last night in two hours, and that fed 72 kids for three meals a day, every day for a year,” he said.

The rice meals he mentioned consist of rice, soy, vitamin powder and veggies. Six cups of a mixture of those are placed in a bag and sealed. Each bag provides for six meals.

Once the bags are packed, they are shipped out to ministry partners in over 50 countries around the world.

For Pastor Raphael Mnkandhla of City Church, the event brings back memories of growing up in Zimbabwe.

“For me, it’s almost like a double experience, in some way, because I grew up in Zimbabwe, and I remember 1992 there was a big drought and I remember just like a lot of like World Health Organizations bringing in aid. And it was meals like these that sustained us when literally we couldn’t get anything,” he shared.

“The need is there, no matter where. So this impacts places where there is war, impacts places where there is drought, where rain is not there, but also economic crisis,” Mnkandhla said. “There’s so many layers in there that are met as a result of this. Just a diverse whether it’s pandemics, in terms of disease, you know, HIV, AIDS, whether it’s malnutrition…it doesn’t matter what circumstances are around, you’re obviously going to find people who are starving, and children usually are the ones who are the biggest casualty to that. And so this provides, what we’d say, balanced nutrition for them,” he added.

Mnkandhla noted that during the weeks before Christmas, the Advent Season, when the church waits for the birth of Jesus at Christmas it’s important for those who will receive to give to others.

“It’s just really recognizing that for us, it’s called the Advent season, where we celebrate Jesus coming to earth and giving us the gift of eternal life, the gift of being reconciled with God. So for us, (we) want to turn around and say like those who have received a gift, what does it look like for us to give a gift and serve specifically the least of these, those who are vulnerable whether it’s locally or whether it’s globally,” he said.

“This right here is more like a global initiative of actually what does it look like then to impact lives across the world where hunger is a problem on a daily basis, and so these meals come in very handy for that,” he said.

“It’s just a refreshing thing for the churches like us and City Alliance to come together to actually contribute to something that’s even bigger than ourselves, which is just contributing towards world change,” he added.

Laura Kriger, of City Alliance, along with her children, who are 10 and 12 years old, were at both packing sessions.

“I love anything that has to do with volunteering and I was really excited that I could bring my kids too,” Kriger said.

“I have a heart for our local community but also anything that involves children or people that are struggling with food insecurity, both internationally and here locally,” she added.

She shared that after the first night, she talked with her children about the experience.

“We actually sort of talked about it when we got home. I think it’s taught them a lot. It taught them some perspective about understanding the security that they have and the security that others don’t. And because I think there’s no way to really fully understand that until you see… they held food that other people are going to eat, that you know if they didn’t pack that, that people would literally not eat. So I think being able to do that gave them sort of a connection to those kids,” Kriger said.

“And I think in this holiday season, that’s sort of about having too much and wanting too much. It really was able to center them and bring them back to like, hey, let’s get back to really understanding a love for other people and sharing with other people. And it was really beautiful. So I was really grateful that they were here and we were able to do it as a family, and they were able to see not everyone is as blessed as we are, and this is a way we can give our time. We were able to, you know, give a little bit of our money and just have a shared experience with other people in our community. It was beautiful,” she said.