Meal brigade will feed starving children

An army of Naperville-area volunteers will spend six 12-hour days packing a million specially formulated meals for starving children in Sudan.

The production line will begin churning out the packaged meals at 9 a.m. Saturday at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, 1500 Brookdale Road. Its work will end at 9 p.m. Sept. 27.

The feat is being performed under the auspices of Feed My Starving Children, a Minnesota-based Christian nonprofit organization that is celebrating its first year of operation in Illinois.

"What's different about this packing is we're doing a million meals in one week, which we have never done here in Illinois before and we've only done it once in Minnesota," said Bea Pedersen, the group's Chicago area director of development.

More than 3,600 volunteers culled from church groups, Scout troops, service organizations and corporations will pack the specially designed ingredients that go into the meals for shipment to the African country. They will fill four 50-foot shipping containers.

The meals consist of rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and a vitamin and mineral mix, Pedersen said. The volunteers will weigh, measure, seal, pack and label the bags.

The group started sending specially designed meals nearly 20 years ago after missionaries in Third World countries complained that sending preprocessed snack foods was actually doing more damage to the children than good.

"The children are so malnourished they can't digest highly processed foods," Pedersen said. "This food formula was designed specifically for someone in that condition that one cup of food a day will help rebuild muscles and bones."

Mike Ryder, director of outreach and social justice at St. Thomas, said parishioners have worked with Pedersen's group in the past and used the meals to send to a church-sponsored orphanage in Haiti. They were looking for another opportunity to get involved with Feed My Starving Children, he said.

"We're going to have 16 or 17 sessions people will be able to participate in packing the meals," he said. "We're a little light with the afternoon sessions during the week."

Ryder said anyone who wants to volunteer for a shift or multiple shifts during the effort can call the church at (630) 355-8980.

"We're also going to track the progress at our Web site, www.stapostle.org," he said. "If we're close, but not sure that we're going to make it, we may add some sessions and stay late so that we meet our goal."

Pedersen said her group "quadruple" checks with distribution partners in the countries they serve to make sure the meals make it to the children who need them.

"We know that in 18 years of shipping these meals to over 45 countries, we've only lost one container, and that was in Eastern Europe," Pedersen said. "We're in constant contact with our distribution partners to make sure the food is getting there and not winding up on the black market."