(This blog post is a contribution from Kindra French, owner of 101 Mobility® in San Diego.)
At 101 Mobility® in San Diego, we are committed to serving the needs of our community, both locally and globally. Organizations like Stop Hunger Now and Samaritan’s Purse are bringing hope and healing to people in need around the world. Recently, we had the opportunity to partner with both of these incredible organizations, providing a means for us to respond to the needs of the global community in incredibly practical ways.
On a Wednesday evening, we joined volunteers at Daybreak Church in Carlsbad, partnering with Stop Hunger Now to pack over 10,000 nutrient-rich meals to be distributed to needy families worldwide. Stop Hunger Now is driven by the vision of a world without hunger, and its mission is to end hunger in our lifetime. Stop Hunger Now works toward this goal by providing food and life-changing aid to the world’s most vulnerable people and creating a global commitment to mobilize the necessary resources.
Meal-packaging events, like the one hosted at Daybreak Church, are the heart of their work. For the meal-packing event, ingredients and supplies were delivered to our volunteer location, and we worked with teams at packaging stations. As volunteers, we set up and took down packaging stations and equipment, filled bins with raw ingredients, scooped ingredients into meal bags, weighed and sealed the bags, boxed and stacked them on pallets, and loaded the pallets and equipment onto a truck.
Stop Hunger Now meals are nutritiously sound. Every dehydrated rice/soy meal is fortified with 23 essential vitamins and nutrients. Research has shown that one in three people in developing countries are adversely affected by vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
We are grateful to be a part of an organization that is addressing hunger with a comprehensive plan for nutrition. The event increased our awareness about global hunger and offered us a very practical way to be involved in fighting it. We were humbled to realize that our small act of service will tangibly impact thousands of people around the world.
Each year, Samaritan’s Purse hosts a program called Operation Christmas Child that impacts millions of children worldwide. Participants fill shoeboxes with small gifts: fun toys, hygiene items, and school supplies. All are then distributed to children living in poverty around the world. Samaritan’s Purse delivers nearly 9 million Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes each year, and in order to achieve this incredible volume of giving, army volunteers are mobilized to serve at 8 different processing centers around the nation.
My husband Gary (co-owner at 101 Mobility® in San Diego) and I led a team of volunteers to serve at the Southern California Operation Christmas Child Processing Center, where we inspected, sorted, and packed several thousand gift boxes for shipping to the Philippines.
While at the OCC Processing Center, we met a young man named Luis Gonzales, who shared his moving story with us. Luis grew up in poverty in Panama, and at the age of 6, lived with his mother and her abusive boyfriend. He begged his mother to send him to school, hopeful that being in school would offer relief from his difficult home life. His mother could not afford school supplies, and even though they had no religious background, she told young Luis to pray. And so he did.
The very next day, a friend invited him to a local church gathering, and he received an Operation Christmas Child shoebox. Inside the box were the needed school supplies! That shoe box was a turning point in Luis’s life. Because of the gift he received, his journey of faith began, his hopes were fulfilled, and he knew that he was valued.
It is completely overwhelming to think of the life-changing impact that each shoebox that passed through our hands-on its way to a child might bring. Again, simple acts of service resulted in meeting immeasurable needs.
At 101 Mobility® of San Diego, our mission is to cultivate ongoing acts of service, in our local community and beyond, that will have a lasting impact on those we serve. Honestly, spending a couple of days packaging food items and gifts for children was not a difficult or heroic task. There’s nothing noteworthy about my husband and I standing on a processing line for a few hours. It wasn’t hard; it wasn’t exceptional; it wasn’t a big deal.
But what is noteworthy is the opportunity to be a part of something that’s exponentially bigger than we are. To be a part of something that’s making a huge difference in the lives of people in need. To do a little thing that joins with lots of other little things to accomplish something huge. Being part of a community. Working together with one mind and purpose.
And that’s really what 101 Mobility® of San Diego is all about.
101 Mobility® is here for all your mobility and accessibility needs. Our company has many years of experience helping place seniors, caregivers, and disabled individuals with the equipment needed to stay independent in their lives.If you’d like to reach us, call (888) 258-0652, send us an email at the Contact Us page, or leave us a comment below.