Hiawatha School Cafeteria Cranks Out 13,000 Meals on a Saturday Morning

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By Chris Earl

Story Created: Feb 13, 2010 at 2:51 PM CST

Story Updated: Feb 13, 2010 at 6:37 PM CST

HIAWATHA — On a Saturday morning when the halls of Nixon Elementary should be empty and the cafeteria should be quiet, volunteers spent hours cranking out food.

Dozens of volunteers, many from Skogman Realty, became the latest to offer their money and time to help feed victims of last month’s deadly earthquake in Haiti.

“Now we are hearing the food is getting out and distributed to people,” said Taylor Skogman, taking a break from packing 64 tight boxes with enough food to provide 13,000 meals. “Kids Against Hunger is working with people there. We’re sure people are getting the food now.”

Dustin Lee, director of Kids Against Hunger of Cedar Rapids, said 40,000 children around the world die each day because of hunger.

In the days after the earthquake hit Haiti, a lot of help came in from the United States. But Lee also hopes the event will sustain a focus on feeding others. “We want to make this a continual packaging thing to send food into places where people are starving,” Lee said.

Organizers with Kids Against Hunger say they expect the food packed on Saturday will be cooked and consumed in Haiti in about a month. They said they are able to feed a child for “as little as 25 cents”.

Jaeden Ray, 7, spent Saturday working alongside her mother. She said her arm was a little tired from moving hundreds of bags of food along the processing line.

At the end of the assembly line, Holly Hasenbank, a sixth-grader at Harding Middle School in Cedar Rapids, used a Sharpie to mark the number of bags of dry food coming into each box. “Haiti is just so sad after the earthquake
and I wanted to help," she said.

Lee encourages anyone interested in helping Kids Against Hunger to contact him at (319) 491-6660 or through their website at www.kidsagainsthungercr.com.

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