By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider

Wes Yeary has led mission trips to Mexico, Africa and Brazil over the last seven years. But for immediate impact and the chance to "expose a mass number of our student-athletes to mission work," there's nothing like the annual mobile packing event that was held Monday on the Ferrell Center floor. A small army of a record 523 volunteers - Baylor coaches, student-athletes, administrators and staff - packed 124,416 meals for the Feed My Starving Children project that sends packaged nutritional meals to more than 70 countries around the world.

"Not everybody can go overseas," said Senior Associate Athletic Director Chad Jackson, who has overseen Baylor's mobile packing event for each of the last four years. "Wes does a great job, and we annually take 50-plus (people on the mission trips). But you can't get the bulk, with each sport involved, in one trip. With this, you can."

With crews working in three two-hour shifts, the assembly-line process involved all 19 of Baylor's intercollegiate sports and packaged an average of nearly 41,500 meals per shift.

"Anytime you get to help anybody else, it's a blessing," said senior Spencer Drango, an All-American offensive tackle on the fifth-ranked Baylor football team. "Being student-athletes, we're given a lot. So, it's an awesome experience to be able to give back to help people in need."

Teams at each processing table fill individual bags with the four main ingredients for a nutritional product especially designed by food scientists from Cargill and General Mills to feed starving children - rice, soy, vegetables and vitamins.

As each box of 216 meals is filled, teams yell out for the warehouse workers to move the box, where it is then weighed and wrapped up and placed on pallets.

"It really fulfills part of the mission we have of reaching out and serving in missions around the world," said Yeary, the Baylor Athletics Chaplain. "This gives our student-athletes a little taste of giving. What we talked about was how doing just a little makes a great impact. . . . We will be able to feed 340 kids for a whole year. It's pretty cool to think in that short a time you can impact a kid for a whole year." Backed by the financial support of Director of Athletics Ian McCaw, Baylor bumped up its production by about 15 percent this year. In each of the three previous years of the program, there were 108,864 meals packed. At a cost of 22 cents per meal, Baylor Athletics paid over $27,000 for this year's Feed My Starving Children MobilePack event.

"The athletic department contacted us this year and said we want to push these guys a little bit, give them a chance to be a little more comfortable," said Heather Hecht, MobilePack development advisor for Feed My Starving Children. "So, we put in the ingredients for two extra pallets of food, and they still blew it out of the water."

Jackson said the idea behind the increase was that "you don't want to be content . . . we want to keep stretching ourselves."

"Ian was there to support the extension of ourselves to push ourselves up to 124,000 (meals) and change," Jackson said. "We don't want this to become stale, we don't want it to grow old. . . . As long as the enthusiasm is there, as long as the commitment is there with the volunteers - and we had participation from all 19 sports - we don't see any slowdown at this point. The student-athletes continue to enjoy it, continue to show enthusiasm, so you want to keep stretching them." As music blasts through the loud speakers, the teams in each shift compete to see who can fill the most boxes.

"Great energy and a great group of kids to work with," Hecht said. "They have a ton of fun and also pack a lot of meals for us."

Nina Davis, an All-American forward on the Lady Bear basketball team, said: "To know that we're going to feed over 300 kids for a year is something that we'll be able to keep with us and know that we were a part of that."

Started in 1987 by Minnesota businessman Richard Proudfit, Feed My Starving Children is expected to pack 270 million meals this year, "and 74 million of those will come from MobilePack events like this," Hecht said.

"We've had some pretty phenomenal growth that we can only attribute to God's grace and provision on us," she said. "We certainly can't do all that ourselves."

If you are interested in finding out more information about Feed My Starving Children, check out the web site at www.fmsc.org.