Feed the Hungry

Part of our mission here in San Miguel is to establish good relations and contacts with people or groups in the town.  Since Proyecto Puentes de Salud (our group) is an annual trip of first year medical students, we hope that we can provide future groups with information they may need for their projects.  As part of this, we met on Saturday morning with a group called Feed the Hungry.  This organization was started twenty years ago, originally as a soup kitchen.  It now operates on a larger scale, establishing school kitchens in rural communities surrounding San Miguel.  They receive funding to build these kitchens in communities in need (those that don't receive meals from DIF) and hire local women to be the chefs.  They currently have 34 kitchens operating, feeding 4,000 children every school day.

What got me most excited were two projects that they've started working on.  One is a garden program where families are given supplies and information about how to plant and cultivate their own vegetables in their yards.  The other is a nutrition education program for mothers, teaching them which foods are healthy and how to make them. The meeting got me really excited about how we can make a greater impact in future years.  It's difficult right now because we can't do much since it's the first year, but we're figuring things out for the future!

The program relies heavily on volunteers, the majority of whom are retired Americans and Canadians living in San Miguel.  I've included some pictures here that I took at the main kitchen in San Miguel where they compile and package the food to be distributed to the 34 kitchens in and around San Miguel.  If anyone is interested in reading more about Feed the Hungry, their website is www.feedthehungrysma.org.