Northern Wyoming News - Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years

HYATTVILLE – Saturday's meal packing for the Nicaragua Christian Education Foundation in Hyattville went well with people from all over the state meeting to pack meals to be sent to Nicaragua to help starving children.

"We packed 77,328 meals with the help of 80 volunteers," organizer Nancy Jones said.

The food was packed in an assembly line fashion, with stations set up to fill, weigh, seal, and box the meals. The full boxes, which each held 36 meals, were than taken to the tapers to be taped and immediately loaded on to a truck.

The NiCE Foundation supplies meals to thousands of needy children in Nicaragua every month. According to the release, "One of the ministries of the NiCE Foundation is our Feed Nicaragua ministry. It became obvious that the children in the schools and churches we work with were suffering from hunger, and their families were unable to supply the nutrition that was needed. The struggling Christian schools were trying to use their meager resources to supplement the nutrition of the student. The children were sluggish, and this was affecting their learning. We began our Feed Nicaragua program to help nourish these children so that the schools could use their resources on education."

The meals consist of four ingredients: dried vegetables, chicken flavoring, soy and rice. According to the release, "NiCE food packages are a rice-soy casserole fortified with 21 essential vitamins and minerals, 6 dehydrated vegetables plus chicken flavoring. This protein (soy) and nutrient rich formula reverses the starvation process." "These meals are sometimes the only meal that child will eat that day," NiCE President Shirley Beltz said.

For more information on the Nice Foundation visit NiceFoundation.org