Starvation and blown tires

Yesterday was a fun day, until it wasn’t.  I drove a truck full of food to a food packing event that it produces meals for those who need food.  This food goes all over the world to where ever it is needed.  Africa, Haiti, anywhere a hurricane strikes or just down the street at the local food shelf.  This is a fun way to get this food ready in mass quantities for groups who are wanting to help out those in need.  The first picture is the back of the truck with the extra ingredients.  The brown and yellow bags are soy protein and the white and green bags are rice.

What you see in the picture is enough food to make 40,000 meals.  There is also some flavoring and vitamins that are added to the mix and each bag has six servings in it.  It is designed to be the right mix of nutrition for a person who is starving and hasn’t eaten for a while.  Of course anyone could eat it.  It is quite tasty and has a chicken soup flavor.

The company that my friend runs also makes a rice and bean mix and oatmeal.  He does this by buying bulk ingredients and then working with groups to host these events.  Yesterday the group I delivered to packaged 9000 meals.  Not a huge amount compared to some, but still enough to feed a lot of people!  The end product was a full pallet of boxes all ready to go.

Here you can see a bit how they set up I had some other picture, but there were a lot of faces and as I don’t know any of these folks I didn’t want to post them out of respect.  They had a group of about 70 people and they knocked out their packaging in about an hour.

We loaded up after that and I headed to another town to drop off the finished food at a trucking warehouse and then home.  I should also add at this point my friend runs his operation using inexpensive tools, old trucks that have been fixed up and his headquarters is an old school that was closed.  He puts the maximum amount of money into his food in order to get the most bang for people’s money.

The problem with this is that things tend to break.

On the way home I blew out both back tires and barely kept my overloaded truck on the road.  The police that came to check on us was amazed that I was able to keep the truck out of the ditch.  My friends came down pulled the tires off and changed them on the side of the road.  We finished up and I got home at 3 am.  One interesting thing I learned was how to seat a truck tire using ether starting fluid and a torch.  It was cool to watch, I wish I would have taken a video.

There are not enough people like my friends in the world.  He has pretty much dedicated his life to this program and feeding the starving people in the world.  There is such a huge need for this, but the funds are limited and the means to move massive quantities of food in a usable form from this country to another are not cheap.  Yet he keeps pushing forward and has packaged countless millions of meals for others and he only has a small staff of a few paid employees and a fleet of run down trucks to do it.  He doesn’t buy tv commercial time, he doesn’t spend his money on fancy buildings or even wear nice clothes.  He is a saint who wears plaid.  He’s been an inspiration for me since I’ve met him and he is pushing me in this direction.  I have liked to help his causes with help and by giving him money.

I’ve come to the conclusion that doing selfless and mostly thankless work like this is where my life is going.  I’ve had some ideas lately about starting a program that helps people in need.  He has the corner on the food market and I don’t think I could do it better.  What I want to explore is the need for another human need - shelter.

I was shocked to learn that in Minnesota when prisoners are done with their sentence they are now booted out of prison whether or not they have a place to go.  This isn’t a huge problem in the summer as it’s pretty nice, but there are limited places to go when it’s cold.  The system already stacks the deck against felons and criminals and many times they are forced to return to their life of crime just to make ends meet.  To me if someone has done their time, it’s time to move on and give them another chance at making a better life for themselves.  This just doesn’t happen.

I’m going to work on a plan that helps this group of people, the people that society would rather see locked up and stay out of sight.  Sometimes all they need is a chance.  Sure some of them will go back and reoffend, but most just want to get on with it and be normal.

I’m not sure how all this will work out, but what I want to do will help these people meet a basic need.  The need to have a place called home.  If they don’t have that to worry about, they can find a job, they can help their families and communities.  They will have one less major worry that will allow them to keep working in a good direction.  There is a few ways this could happen and a nearly infinite amount of variables that could be used to help.

I am planning on going big with this and making a plan that could be copied by others to help spread a sustainable way to help the ridiculous number of people than cycle through the prisons in this country.  More to come here, but I need to get these ideas out of me and into the world.