N. Dakota students know hunger, feed the hungry

FARGO, N.D. — Maria Modi’s journey from South Sudan to a new life in Fargo included a stop at a refugee camp in Cairo. She and her seven siblings know what it is like to be hungry.

“My mother and father work 12-hour shifts, and still sometimes we don’t get enough food at home to last us a week,” said Modi, a Fargo North High School senior who plans to study music and theater in college next year.

She and a group of other students, most from poor refugee families, spent the Thursday before Thanksgiving handing out turkey and cranberries to the hungry of Fargo, which welcomed their arrival from places such as Nepal, Sudan and Liberia. The students, nearly all of whom qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches, recently opened a food pantry as part of the Legacy Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit that helps them earn diplomas while finding out what they’re good at doing.

“I come from a little, poor country,” said Fargo North sophomore Puja Chhertri, one of the food pantry organizers whose family emigrated from Nepal. “There are people on the street there who are eating from garbage.”

The Legacy students have done numerous public service projects, including making and distributing hand-tied fleece blankets to the homeless, running a school carnival and helping at nursing homes and day care centers. This is their first attempt at feeding those in need.

“It’s about hungry kids serving hungry neighbors,” said Mary Jean Dehne, the group’s executive director.

As a proportion of its population, Fargo takes in more refugees than most American cities. In the past decade, the Lutheran Social Services program has resettled an average of 450 refugees per year in North Dakota, about 70 percent of whom ended up in Fargo.