(Top right) Amy Upgren and her young son (bottom right) Max Luther of Burke measure food material into one of the Stop Hunger Now bags in the Burke Presbyterian Church sanctuary on Sept. 18. Photo by Tim Peterson.
As Nancy Rosene of Fairfax screeched clear packing tape across the top of a cardboard box filled with dozens of meals worth of dried and dehydrated food, she was highly conscious of where she was and what she was doing.
On the other end of the sanctuary at Burke Presbyterian Church on Sunday, Sept. 18, dozens of volunteers, both from the church and the community, were manually measuring out and filling food packets of a fortified rice-soy meal to be delivered to a yet to be announced poverty-stricken city elsewhere in the world.
“I’m taking the effort of all of these people and putting it into this small box,” Rosene said. “And thinking of where this box is going, what’s waiting on the other end…”
“From this little suburban place in Burke,” she continued, “where sometimes life is a little too easy, maybe we can make it easier for just a small time for someone else.”
Burke Presbyterian called the event “Food Truck Ruckus: Make Some Noise About World Hunger.” True to the name, three food trucks were set up in the church parking lot, along with games for children and adults, a wacky photo booth, and then tents with information on some of the church’s other food-related ministry.
For example, there was a collection being taken up for the church’s Kibwezi partnership with an orphanage in Kenya.
Jeffrey Willard of Lorton is a member of the church’s “Fun Team” committee that helped organize the event.
“It’s all about supplying food to the hungry,” he said. “We want to feed them, but feed ourselves too.”
Carol Ann Cunningham is a community life elder with the Fun Team and coordinated the Ruckus. She said a major part of the afternoon was meant to be intergenerational.
“We have people from ages two to 85,” Cunningham said. “They’re teaching and learning about service.”
Amy Upgren and her young son Max Luther of Burke measured material into one of the bags together in the sanctuary.
“It feels good to make the food packets,” Luther said. “I like to help hungry people so they won’t starve.”
The group providing all the materials is national non-profit Stop Hunger Now, which acts as an intermediary between churches, schools and corporate groups of volunteers and then humanitarian organizations on the ground that make sure the meals get delivered and not resold or discarded.
The church pays all the costs to volunteer through Stop Hunger Now, who could just as well package all the food using an automated system in a warehouse.
“But the goal is for volunteers to do it themselves, be part of the process,” said Joe Gautier, program manager with Stop Hunger Now. “Fifty percent of the job is awareness.”
Every time the packaging group -- which turned over with new volunteers every half hour, three times -- reached another 1,000 meals, one volunteer got to take a turn banging a large gong.
On the day, the group packaged 10,000 meals.
“Church is all about doing what you can with the people you’ve got, when you can,” Burke Presbyterian co-pastor Jarrett McLaughlin said. “It’s as much about what you believe as what you do.”