A group of 17 people from Crossroads Community Church (together with a group from Ocean-view Community Church in Ladysmith) have just arrived home from Abbots-ford where they worked at the Fraser Valley Gleaners.
The Gleaners is a non-profit group that gathers otherwise wasted food and produces dried soup mixes for countries suffering from food shortages.
For every hour of volunteer work, from each person, they produce 150 bowls of nutritious soup. As volunteers worked last week, a shipment of soup left for Somalia.
In ancient times landowners were required to leave some of the harvest lying in the fields, so that the poor could receive enough food to survive. "Gleaners" were those who walked behind the workers in the fields, collecting what had been left behind. In 1999, the Fraser Valley Gleaners Society was formed, a non-profit Canadian registered charity, primarily volunteer run, dedicated to fulfilling this biblical principle of collecting locally grown surplus produce to feed the hungry in the name of Christ.
Produce that is undersized or has small imperfections often gets thrown away. Today volunteers are turning this food into a dried soup mix and distributing it to more 40 counties worldwide.
- Submitted
