In October members made up 35 children’s backpacks for the charity Mary’s Meals. Each backpack contained school materials (notebook, pencil case, pens, pencils, ruler etc.) clothing items (t-shirt, shorts or skirt and flip-flops) a tennis ball and washing items (towel, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste).
Each backpack was labelled to show the intended age and gender of the recipient. Members had been collecting the backpacks and contents for many months and, with many willing helpers, they were all filled within 2 hours. There were also two boxes of extra items that the charity will take and use to ‘top up’ other donated backpacks.
The charity will deliver the backpacks to school children at one of their feeding stations at a school in a developing country. Such schools are often very remote with no shops nearby, and families are often too poor to buy school materials even if there were a shop.
When Tim Olsen came to talk to us about Mary’s Meals recently, he told us of his field visits to feeding stations and of the joy and delight he saw when children were given a backpack.
