Area residents band together to help Haiti

By KELSEY HANSEN

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Hurley - Over sixty community members, kids and adults alike, came together Saturday morning to help package food to send to malnourished communities in Haiti.

The event took place at the Range Community Bible Church, although it was not a specific church function as it was open to the whole community.

 Chuck Guerber, missionary with the Range Community Bible Church, helped organize the event and bring eight members from the Kids Against Hunger St. Peters, Missouri satellite location.

Jerry Lantz, the satellite director for the St. Peters location, along with a few colleagues, brought up all the raw food and materials to package.

"It was really Jerry who had the idea to do this," Guerber said.

"This is on their own time too, coming up and bringing all the materials."

The church and community members raised roughly $5,600 for the event, which was the equivalent of 20,000 meals and all were packaged on Saturday.

"Each meal costs about 28 cents and with the 20,000 meals being packaged today it will feed 49 people one meal a day for a whole year," Lantz said.

Each meal is only about 8 ounces of food but the vitamins and minerals used are meant to fill a person up.

"There are 8 villages and some schools in Haiti that rely on this program," Guerber said.

"My wife and I have been to the community that these packages will be going to and it will help fight malnourishment there."

Guerber said that Haiti is the most malnourished country in the world, with the northwestern area the worst part of the country.

"We have been to the schools down there and you walk into one where the kids are hungry and malnourished and they just sit there with blank stares in their eyes," Guerber said.

"Once we give them these meals it's like night and day. The kids are alert and acting like normal kids."

This was the first year that the church and community has done this program and is making it a goal to continue to grow it for next year.

There were five separate stations set up on Sat. and workers at each station were filling bags a specific way.

First added to a bag are the vitamins and minerals powder, then dehydrated vegetables, next the vitamin-certified crushed soy and lastly the long-grain white rice.

Once a bag was filled, it was passed to the weighing station, then to be sealed and finally put in a box to be shipped to Haiti.

Each individual bag contains six servings and can be made with only six cups of boiling water.

Everyone was involved in some step in the process, even the younger kids who were able to color and write on the sealed boxes going to Haiti.

The organizers were especially pleased and a bit surprised with the amount of community members who showed up for the event.

"I think Jerry and I would agree, this is an extremely good turn out," Guerber said.

Guerber and his wife Gail are in Haiti quite often doing their ministry work and just recently returned from the latest trip only about a week ago.

They go for about a week at a time although the two of them lived in Haiti for nearly 9 months during one of their trips.

And they have lived on the Kids Against Hunger food that was being packaged, a sign of good faith that the food is of quality for these malnourished communities.

"We made it to the grocery store maybe twice that entire stay," Guerber shared.

"And so we ate the program food at least once a week," Gail shared. "And it actually tastes pretty good."

For anyone interested in learning more about Haiti or have a desire to go on one of these missionary trips, contact Guerber at 906-932-2500 or visit the Guerbers' blog at http://nwhaiti.blogspot.com/. For more information about Kids Against Hunger, visit the website at kidsagainsthunger.org.