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DURHAM — About 90 volunteers went to Durham Academy on Monday afternoon to help ensure that hundreds of others will do the same somewhere else in the world.
The school was holding its first day of service on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The event was arranged in conjunction with Stop Hunger Now, a 12-year-old Raleigh organization that sends food and other goods to needy places around the globe.
“I’m really very pleased,” Anne McNamara, the school’s community service director, said as the Brumley Performing Arts Building began filling with several dozen volunteers. “I’m thrilled. There were some skeptical people at the beginning saying nobody’s going to come, everybody’s going to go skiing.”
The goal of Monday’s event was to pack 20,000 meals in about two hours. Things started off smoothly, despite a brief blackout.
Stop Hunger Now was represented by its Raleigh coordinator, Terry Brown. He started his instructions by telling the audience to go into the hallway to clean their hands and don hairnets.
The crowd included Headmaster Ed Costello. “Glad to do it,” he said of showing up on a holiday to volunteer. “Glad to be a part of it. I didn’t know about this, though,” he added, wryly indicating his hairnet.
Also present was Lee Hark, head of the Upper School. “There’s a great spirit on this campus for community service,” he said as the room refilled. “It’s a big part of who we are.”
Brown told the crowd that Stop Hunger Now ships many of its meals to schools. Running feeding programs through schools has multiple long-term benefits, he said, including increasing academic performance and prompting women to postpone marriage and to bear fewer children.
The meals, all dehydrated, consist of a chicken-flavored vitamin tablet, vegetable flakes, soy and rice. They are poured into bags, which are calibrated to make sure they weigh 380 to 385 grams each and then sealed and packed into boxes. A gong is banged after every five boxes are filled to indicate when roughly 1,000 meals have been readied.
Meals have a shelf life of five years but are usually eaten within three. The contents of each bag, when opened and boiled for 45 minutes, can feed up to six people. Each meal costs 25 cents to prepare, which does no
Durham Academy’s volunteers began packing around 1:45 p.m. The first gong was banged, by first-grader Camille Capehart, at 1:54 p.m. Other gongs followed in short order — 1:59 p.m., 2:05 p.m., 2:10 p.m., 2:14 p.m., 2:22 p.m. and so forth.
“The gong — that’s probably the greatest thing to do,” said Derek Rhodes, a Durham Academy junior who was photographing Monday’s event and had helped out at a recent Stop Hunger Now event. “But aside from that, I would probably saying being a runner. It’s the most chaotic job. People are always calling you because they need something.”
Spanish teacher Liliana Simón, like other event organizers, said she was thrilled by the turnout and eager to make the Martin Luther King Jr. day of service a regular event.
“I think we’re going to do this every year,” Simón said. “That would be fantastic.”
