WINONA LAKE – Like a hive of bees, thousands of students from Warsaw Community Schools kept busy working Wednesday packing meals for hungry children around the world.

The buzz of excitement for the first day of the Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) Warsaw MobilePack was so loud, it nearly drowned out all other conversation in the Gordon Student Recreation Center gym on the Grace College campus in Winona Lake.

Students – along with other local volunteers from the community and businesses – will continue to pack the meals through Saturday, with a goal of preparing 1,080,000 meals. That will feed nearly 3,000 children for a full year.

FMSC is a Christian non-profit organization committed to feeding starving children hungry in body and spirit, according to the website. People donate funds for the meal ingredients. Volunteers hand-pack the meals, called MannaPacks, and meals are donated to FMSC food partners around the world.

Warsaw MobilePack Chair Megan Stone said, “Feed My Starving Children works in 70 different countries worldwide, and they work with established partners who are already embedded in the communities within those countries. Those nonprofit organizations and (government organizations) are contracted with Feed My Starving Children, and they also have to meet the criteria in order to maintain partnership.”

Meals are sent to wherever the need is the greatest at the time.

She said this event was the fourth for this community. It started in 2014, and continued in 2015 and 2016 before taking a break in 2017.

“Each year we have incremently increased. And this year – because the need is there and because we have the community members’ support and the financial donations necessary – we are able to pack 1,080,000 meals. So we went ahead and adjusted our contract for these meals. We prepay for the ingredients,” she explained.

Each culturally-neutral meal packet contains 6 to 12 servings, depending on the food formula, according to the FMSC website. The MannaPack Rice formula consists of vitamin-packed flavoring, dried vegetables, soy protein and rice.

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In 2014, the Warsaw MobilePack had 5,000 volunteers; packed 4,644 boxes; and made 1,003,104 meals to feed 2,748 kids for a year, according to information provided.

There were 5,885 volunteers in 2015 and 4,478 in 2016. Boxes increased to 4,932 in 2015 and 4,968 in 2016. Meals packed increased to 1,065,312 in 2015 and 1,073,088 in 2016 to feed 2,918 kids and 2,939 kids respectively.

Stone predicted there will be nearly 5,500 volunteers this year.

“We’ll be running 12 sessions in all, two-hour sessions,” she said. “We have 2,500 Warsaw Community Schools students participating. Additionally, we have a lot of sports teams, church groups, a lot of area businesses that are going to participate.”

WCS Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert said Warsaw students were involved because, “A big part of our mission statement is pursuing dreams and enriching the lives of others. This is a great part of enriching the lives of others.”

He said students have raised money to make the event happen, and then get to do the work to impact others in the world.

“So it’s a huge part of our mission statement and just something that instills that love of helping other people out,” Hoffert said.

One of those students working Wednesday was Washington STEM Academy sixth-grader Ethan Wetzel, who was taking part in FMSC for the first time.

“I thought it was going to be pretty fun in helping children out with their foods and stuff,” he said, adding that it was as fun as he thought it would be.

“We’ve been getting food in bags to help them get food so they can have some food to eat,”?he said.

More than 400 volunteers from Zimmer Biomet will help out for two hours on Friday.

“Zimmer Biomet has been the top donor there, the Impact Award Donor. We had two Impact sponsors – Zimmer Biomet and Sym Financial,” she said.

Banners of all the sponsors hung in the  hallway leading up to the packing area.

There will be two shifts on Saturday, from 9 to 11 a.m. and 12 to 2 p.m. Those shifts were not full as of Wednesday.

“We are hoping to have more people register to come pack,” Stone said.  That can be done online at warsawmobilepack.com. She estimated they are short about 150 people for the morning session and around 200 for the afternoon. “But we’ll get the job done with whoever shows.”

Even in its fourth year, Stone said there is more interest in the FMSC Warsaw MobilePack than before.

“More so I would say because people have event awareness and they know what the needs are, and there has been passion building for this. The fact that we took a year off last year to kind of regroup and come up with a strategic plan, per se, to mobilize so that more community members were involved in the leadership aspect of it, that helped. The fact that we didn’t do it last year made the desire even greater for this year,” she said.

The steering committee, which is made up of 14 people, will evaluate this year’s event after it’s finished and determine whether they want to do the MobilePack annually or every other year.

“The desire is there and, again, the interest has grown, so we know that the support is out there. We’re just going to evaluate that,” Stone said.