Students come together to offer a hand of hope
Lenten service project packaged thousands of meals for families
When the clock struck 12:40 p.m. on Wednesday, dozens of students at Annunciation Catholic School, St. Charles Catholic School and St. Thomas Aquinas School flooded the Annunciation school gym. One by one, each grabbed hairnets and headed to one of several tables spread across the room.
At each table were boxes filled with loose rice, beans, dehydrated vegetables and chicken flavoring. Once the students arrived at their respective tables, they armed themselves with plastics cups and began taking turns scooping, dumping loose rice, beans and chicken flavoring down a funnel and into a plastic bag. They filled bag after bag with the food items on their tables.
This was all a part of Annunciation Catholic School’s Lenten service project, “Hands of Hope.” With the goal of packaging more than 50,000 meals on Wednesday, the action inside the gym was simultaneously chaotic and efficient.
In the middle of this commotion was Annunciation Catholic School teacher and campus minister Alicia Eiler. Bouncing from table to table, providing students with instructions, Eiler helped spearhead the project and called it a great way to get the students involved in a community effort.
“Every kid here can make a difference, scoop by scoop, and every scoop that goes into a bag goes to feed somebody hungry,” Eiler said. “It shows that one person can make a big difference.”
Two of those persons making a difference were Annunciation eighth graders Jacob Roberts and Jacob Osborne. The pair spent the afternoon pushing around (and occasionally riding on) a flat bed cart they used to collect boxes full of food and move them outside so they could be loaded onto a truck.
Everywhere the two Jacobs went, they had smiles on their faces.
“It’s a good feeling to help people and that we’re making a difference in the world,” Roberts said.
That difference in this case will be feeding hungry families across Albuquerque. Some of those hungry families that will be receiving meals are in the La Mesa Elementary School district.
Annette Saiz, who teaches first grade at La Mesa, took home 360 meals to distribute to her school’s families next week.
“We’re a community school. We service 19 languages. We have children who come from refugee camps. We have families who need support,” Saiz said. “So this will be a useful thing for the families and for our school.”
The rest of the packaged meals will be distributed to families in need by the nonprofit Food For Kidz over the next several weeks.