Supporting the Congleton Rotary Meal Pack Event

It was an earlier than usual start for a Sunday morning for the Knutsford group participating in the Congleton Rotary Meal Pack event. The team of John Savage, Jenny Clegg and Tony and Alison Booth arrived in Congleton early enough for a relaxed coffee before the real work began.

The Meal Pack Event which Congleton Rotary had organised supports the work of Rise Against Hunger by providing meal packs to feed children at school in third world countries, mainly in Africa.   The ingredients for the meals are rice, soya, lentils along with essential vitamins all packed in a sealed polythene pack.

We arrived at  the venue along with a 100 or more other volunteers and were allocated to our workstation where we were provided with containers containing the ingredients of the packs with plenty of back up supplied in the sacks under the table.  After the usual introductions we were given instructions on the process for filling the packs before the gong was sounded and work began.  

The Knutsford team, including an additional team member from Congleton as 5 were needed in total, quickly got into a routine led by Tony Booth who had experience from similar events in previous years.   The packs  were soon being filled at a surprisingly fast rate, up to one every 10 seconds at times!  Once filled they were handed over to another group of volunteers whose role was to check the weight of each pack before heat-sealing them for packing in cardboard boxes.

We were given progress reports regularly over the loudspeaker and we could see the pile of packed cardboard boxes growing rapidly.  It did not seem long before the gong was sounded for a final time as our task had been completed.

We had packed over 30,000 meals, enough to provide a hot meal for 139 school children every school day for a year!

The whole event was organised and run with a great spirit of team work and camararderie and we all had a fantastic time.  More importantly in our own small way we had made an impact on relieving poverty amongst children leading to resilience, self-sufficiency, education, empowerment and bright futures.

In addition the Knutsford Club gave £400 towards the cost of the ingredients for the meal packs.