Pictures: Feed My Starving Children

In the two weeks since the call went out for volunteers, more than 1,200 adults and children signed up for Darien's Feed My Starving Children mobile-packing event. That was 200 more than needed to create the 225,000 meals for delivery to orphanages, clinics and refugee camps in 60 nations, said event coordinator Linda Yim.

"Word spread like wildfire, through online sign-ups and word of mouth," Yim said. "This has been an incredible community-building experience."

This past weekend, Oct. 3 and 4 at Middlesex Middle School, over 1,000 volunteers (third graders and older) gave two hours of their time to package rice, soy and dehydrated vegetables: a mix that can save the life of a starving child.

"Eighteen thousand children die every day from starvation," said event organizer, Stella Clarke.

Feed My Starving Children is a non-profit Christian organization committed to feeding starving children. Darien's FMSC mobile packing event is the first of its kind on the East Coast, a team effort of all Darien’s churches and schools, in what may be a historically unprecedented display of community-wide philanthropy.

Volunteers donning white caps and aprons met at the MMS cafeteria, to mix rice and soy with dehydrated vegetables and a chicken-flavored vitamin and mineral mix according to a fixed ratio. All that’s required for food preparation at the destination point is popping the small pouches in boiling water. Each mixture was weighed, sealed and packaged into boxes ready for shipping.

FMSC’s food packets are destined for 18 of Africa’s poorest, strife-ridden nations, including Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, 12 in Central and South America and Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and North Korea as well.

Featured are photographs from Saturday, day one of two of the FMSC event. Darien Patch went back to the MMS "factory" on Sunday to take video of our community in action.