Mennonite Weekly Review

AKRON, Pa. — Despite economic difficulties in the past year, the production of Mennonite Central Committee’s mobile meat canner has stayed strong.

Hajrudin Sahic of Merhamet, an MCC partner organization in Bosnia-Herzegovina; Randy Puljek-Shank, an MCC worker; and Adil Pezerovic of Merhamet participate in meat canning at the Cumberland Valley Relief Center in Chambersburg, Pa. — Photo by Tim Friesen/MCC

That has been the case historically in other tough times as well.

Between October and the end of April, the canning crew traveled to two Canadian provinces and 13 U.S. states, working with volunteers to can more than 566,000 cans of meat, up from about 550,000 last season.

Members of this year’s meat canning crew are Steven Bricker of Chambersburg, Pa.; Peter Reimer of Tolstoi, Man.; Viktor Schwendich of Huenfeld, Germany; and Josh Voth of Goessel, Kan.

At different times throughout the season, the canning volunteers were joined by people who work with the distribution of MCC meat in their respective countries. Oksana Oleynikova from Makeevka, Ukraine; Garley Michel from Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Adil Pezerovic from Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina; and Hajrudin Sahic from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, were eager to be a part of the meat canning process.

Oleynikova was interested in how the meat that goes to the work of Good Shepherd Children’s Shelter gets canned. She visited the Whitehorse, Pa., canning site.

According to Leroy Stoltzfus, material resource assistant for MCC East Coast, she was impressed with the number of people who came to work and made a special point to talk to the children who came with their parents to the canning site where she helped fill cans.

Michel visited the canning site in North Newton, Kan., where he participated in each part of the processing work.

“I’ve never seen this kind of effort by people to give to other people,” he said.

Sahic and Pezerovic work for Merhamet, an MCC partner organization in Bosnia-Herzegovina that uses the canned turkey to prepare 10,000 meals a day in soup kitchens. They visited canning sites in Chambersburg and Kirkwood, Pa.