Photo Credit: KYRA BACON
BY KYRA BACON
Cooper City High School students and volunteers gathered on Wednesday, February 26th, in the cafeteria to prepare over 30,000 meals for Feeding Children Everywhere, a charity brought to CCHS by junior Alexis and senior Persis Bhadha.
Feeding Children Everywhere is an organization that provides nutritious meals for hungry children in Africa, parts of Asia and even the Americas. The founders of FCE, which has grown food to feed millions worldwide, carefully crafted the recipe for each meal. The Bhadha sisters brought the charity to CCHS as a club sponsored by Key Club and NHS, and have been raising money to organize the packing event. Every $0.25 raised contributed to a full meal consisting of lentils, rice, vegetables and salt, and by the end of fundraising, they had raised over $7,500.
The event started with the initial set-up at 1:15pm, where students who had joined the FCE club were taught the basics of the assembly line process to package the meals. At 2:30pm, over 160 CCHS students, teachers, parents and even many Cooper City commissioners were taught how the ingredients were to be rationed out, weighed, sealed and packaged into boxes, and put to work. For the next hour and a half, this collection of Cooper City residents packaged 100 boxes, totaling over 30,000 meals.
Kile Riggs and Madison Campbell, representatives from the FCE organization, ran the event, provided energetic music for the workers, supervised the tables, and helped out when needed. As the pile of boxes grew and the ingredients lessened, spirits rose as the truth of what everyone was working so hard to achieve hit home: 33,000 meals are going to be sent to the Greatest Need Fund, which will then send the food to areas of the utmost need and save hundreds of children from starvation.
“Thank you for embarking on this journey with me,” Persis Bhadha said. “It’s been a rollercoaster ride, but in the end, we ended on top. It’s been unforgettable, and I cannot find the words to express how grateful I am to all of the volunteers for attending the packaging event, donating their time and money to our vision, and supporting this amazing cause.”
