From North Carolina-
"Runner!" somebody yells. A small boy wearing a white hairnet comes flying across the Parish Hall and slams down a full plastic bin. He gathers up three empty bins and disappears.
I grab a bag from the bin — it feels heavy — and place it on the scale in front of me — 394 grams. I spoon a little rice out of the top —384. Great! I place the bag into another bin, and the woman across from me snatches it up, smooths out the air and sticks it into the heat sealer in front of her. There are 20 people working our long table, hurriedly weighing bags and sealing them shut.
Behind us at two other tables, 20 more volunteers scoop food into the bags. In front of us, other people are counting full bags, packing and sealing them into cardboard boxes, and loading them onto a large cart. Teens from our youth group push the cart towards the door where the truck is waiting outside. We're all wearing white hairnets. The gong crashes! We've just packed 1,000 meals!
"Hooray!" we shout. But nobody looks up from their work, nobody stops moving. We've got 9,000 meals to go.
- - -
On Friday night, at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Salisbury, volunteers packed 10,000 meals in less than two hours. Under the Stop Hunger Now food packaging program, these meals will be sent to feeding programs in schools and orphanages around the world.
As we gathered in the Parish Hall, the Rev. Whayne Hoagland Jr., St. Luke's rector, introduced Mickey Horner, Charlotte Program Coordinator for Stop Hunger Now.
Horner, an intense man, a man on a mission, gave us the facts: Six billion people on the planet, one billion of them starving. That's 25,000 people dying of hunger every day, most of them children. It's like 125 jumbo jets, loaded with children, crashing — every single day. If actual jets were crashing, people would be crying out for a solution. But deaths from starvation happen more quietly, one at at time, in places most of us have never visited.
More here-
http://www.salisburypost.com/Lifestyle/copy-of-112109-Ten-thousand-meals
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