Blessed Sacrament School students fight hunger

Friday, May. 09, 2014

SANDY — Blessed Sacrament School participated in Stop Hunger Now by raising $4,762.60, which almost doubled their goal of $2,500. On May 2 the middle school religion classes packaged 86 boxes containing 18,576 meals for the nonprofit to distribute.

“These students have done a tremendous job in such a short amount of time,” said Charlene Mukarakate, Stop Hunger Now program manager and Cathedral of the Madeleine parishioner. “The students should really be proud of themselves and their passion for global hunger, for helping other children and for making an impact on the world they live in.”

Each meal costs 25 cents, “so with every dollar buying four meals, we were thrilled to easily surpass our original goal,” said Sonia West, Blessed Sacrament development director. “What is good is that the students were involved by packaging the food rather than just handing over the money.” 

Mukarakate demonstrated how to package the food, and the students processed the contents of beans, rice, spices and vitamins into a bag. Each bag was weighed to make sure they were between 387 and 394 grams. The bags were then sealed and placed into boxes of 36 meals.  

“Each bag holds six meals and varied proteins and herbs will be added to its contents based on the local culture who will receive the meals,” said Mukarakate.  “It tastes like Rice-A-Roni.”

Stop Hunger Now is an international hunger relief agency that was founded 15 years ago in Raleigh, N.C. by a Methodist minister who had a vision to end world hunger. The meal-packaging program, which started seven years ago, serves children in 65 countries around the world. Mukarakate came to Utah to open a location and also serves Idaho and Colorado.

“We primarily support the school aid programs, so this is a great opportunity for impoverished children to get an education as well as nutrition,” said Mukarakate. 

The project became a reality for Blessed Sacrament School when Angela Serzen, religion teacher, saw Stop Hunger Now addressed on a morning news program and thought it sounded interesting, she said. She found out the details and implemented the project in the school. 

The eighth-grade students took over from that point. Madison Humphries, an eighth-grader, stepped up and led this project, said Serzen. 

“Mrs. Serzen said we needed to raise $2,500 so we started thinking about what we could do,” said Humphries. “We had a themed dress week for the whole school and began raising money.”

After thinking of various ideas, the eighth graders decided on an assembly. “It was our opportunity to take charge,” Humphries said. 

They organized the assembly, wrote a prayer, bought and numbered jugs for each class, and had a competition to see who could raise the most money to win an ice cream party. 

“Everyone wanted to win,” said Humphries. “On the first day we raised over $500, by the second day we had almost $2,000 and by the end of the week we had over $4,700. It was really awesome because it is something that Christ would want us to do, it wasn’t something our teacher assigned us to do.” 

During the assembly, a student from each grade read a statistic about hunger in the world. “One of the stats was that a child dies every four seconds from hunger,” said West, who credits the assembly for a lot of the project’s success. 

The eighth-graders each designed a panel for a collaborative screen-printed art piece to go with the Stop Hunger Now project that will be permanently displayed in the school as a graduation project.