Byesville Rotary Club Helps Salvation Army feed kids

Pictured: Byesville Rotarians Chuck Fair, Rhonda Stemmer, and Phyllis Millhone.

Byesville Rotarians choose to meet at the Salvation Army to help back brown-bag lunches for Guernsey County kids between 1 and 18. The goal for the day was to pack 325 lunches: 240 destined to 6 distribution sites in Cambridge; 50 going to Byesville, and 35 for Pleasant City. Each bag contains a sandwich, fruit, a salty snack and several other items.

Byesville Rotary was assigned to the sandwich crew. Another group filled the lunch bags with the goodies of the day. In ½ hour the sandwich crew had all 325 sandwiches made and zipped into sandwich bags.

Debbie Langsdorf, the volunteer coordinating the brown-bag lunch program, pointed out that this was the 20^th year the Salvation has provided lunches to kids during the summer. Langsdorf stated that to date this year the Salvation Army has served 9923 lunches. The program continues until August 9. By that time, the Army will have provided over 10,000 lunches this summer.

Hunger is not going away in our county. The 2019 number of lunches is higher than the 2018 number. Langsdorf described how many of the kids getting lunches stay at the distribution point and eat their lunches as they get them. Others begin to eat their lunches as the start walking home.

On the wall of the prep-area hung a large white-board showing the month of July and the days volunteer groups were scheduled to come. Many of the spaces were empty—no volunteers scheduled. I asked Langsdorf what she did on the days no volunteers showed up. She explained that she had a core group of 5-7 people that showed up almost daily to help. She said, “This small group can get the job done—it just takes longer.”

Byesville Rotary has worked for years to help reduce hunger in Guernsey. The club’s projects include its annual Christmas food basket program, working with other service clubs in the spring to hold a food drive for local food pantries, and donating cash to the Army’s brown-bag lunch program as well as donating to the brown-bag lunch program in Cumberland.

The Byesville club members enjoyed making sandwiches and decided they want to come back on a Thursday to take on the challenge of making over 300 peanut butter sandwiches.