Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — It began at Bethel College with a student e-mail message sent in mid-January.

Bethel College students, clockwise from left, Nathen Yunker, Megan Siebert, Ryan Cummins, Aaron Benton, Maggie Goering and Robbie Wright, package meals to send to Haiti. — Photo by Vada Snider/Bethel College

“Help Haiti!” sophomore Andrew McNary wrote on Jan. 14. “For those of you who want to help out with the disaster in Haiti, here is the event for you!”

The message went on to invite participation in meal packaging on Jan. 15-16 at the El Dorado Civic Center, organized by Bethel graduate Rick McNary’s new charitable organization, Numana Inc. Less than a month later, similar events had taken place at the Kansas Coliseum, Wichita State University and, on Feb. 10, in Bethel’s Memorial Hall.

Students, faculty, staff and people from the surrounding areas packaged the ingredients for 220,750 meals. Each packet contains a formula of rice, soy protein, dehydrated vegetables and vitamins which, when reconstituted with hot water (bottled water accompanies meal shipments), will feed six. The packets can be stored for up to three years — but, Numana staff told the Bethel workers, the packets they had put together would be on the ground in Haiti within a week.

For Rick McNary, the story goes back eight years, to when he was pastor of a Disciples of Christ congregation in Potwin and led mission trips to Central America. His son Andrew was 12, playing baseball with a group of Nica­raguan children. A tiny girl, about 5 years old, came up to Rick McNary.

She was “filthy, smelly and beautiful,” he remembers. She put her arms around his neck and asked him to feed her because she was starving. Later, when he had managed to stop crying, he says, he knew that the course of his life had changed.

“What I wanted,” he said, “was to feed hungry people and to get as many people in the U.S. to help as I could.”

Over the ensuing years, a group of friends came together with whom McNary could talk and pray about his vision. He found the “recipe” for a high-protein, vitamin-rich, non-perishable meal. He made contact with the Salvation Army, which has a high success rate of delivering aid where it’s needed. He formed a board of directors and founded Numana, whose name is meant to evoke biblical manna.

Just last year, the board settled on Haiti as the destination for the first food shipment of 285,120 meal packets, enough to fill a shipping container.

That was the number of packets that came together at the first Numana event in the El Dorado Civic Center Dec. 29-30. Two weeks later, the earthquake struck Haiti. A Salvation Army official called McNary. “Can we airlift that food to Haiti?” he asked. “And can you get us more?”