Many of the 515 or so volunteers at Saturday’s SWIPE Out Hunger food packaging event at Fort Hays State University have families and friends who are Kansas farmers and ranchers.  They can’t imagine what it’s like to be hungry.

They’re assembling 100,000 packages of rice, soy, freeze-dried beans, plus a vitamin blend, for Numana Inc., an international hunger relief organization based in El Dorado.   The package contents, when mixed with water and cooked, feed six people.  The bags are shipped to starving people in the horn of Africa.

“Our volunteers come from the university and the community, and work in one-hour shifts,”  says Kelly Nuckolls, student coordinator of the Global Leadership Project in the FHSU Center for Civic Leadership.

An estimated 25,000 people world-wide die every day from hunger-related issues.  “It’s a big problem,” says Nuckolls.  “This is a fun, hands-on way to make an impact on thousands of lives in a short amount of time.”