A need and a response
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FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Nearly 150 women involved in a stake humanitarian service project to make and assemble school kits here March 23 heard firsthand about the need for such services.
Rosibel Menendez, El Salvador's counselor for political affairs, spoke to the women before they took up their assembly line posts. She told them of devastation caused last year in El Salvador by two earthquakes that struck only one month apart, which left one in six Salvadorans without housing. El Salvador recently asked the Church for school kits.
"We still need your help to reconstruct," she told the members. "The school kits will jump-start our government's efforts to rebuild schools."
The women in the Fredericksburg Virginia Stake Relief Society then filled the cultural hall, Relief Society and Primary rooms, classrooms and hallways as they assembled personal hygiene kits, stitched school bags and stuffed cloth erasers.
They completed 226 school bags, which will be loaded with notebook paper, pencils, chalk and scissors in May, to be sent to the Church's Humanitarian Resource Center in Salt Lake City, for distribution to countries needing such help, said Janet Cropp, Fredericksburg Stake Relief Society president.
The Fredericksburg Stake Relief Society presidency began coordinating the project last year when Stake President Wayne Mathis asked the auxiliary to put together a humanitarian aid event.
"We were prayerful about it," said Denise Moody, stake humanitarian aid specialist. "We wanted to do school kits because [the humanitarian center] said that was something they almost always need. And it was a project that could involve the whole stake."
In addition, Sister Moody contacted three Fredericksburg homeless shelters to see what the nine local Church units in the stake could do for them.
It took 10 months to coordinate the four-hour event, said Jillyne Keene, Relief Society secretary.
Sister Keene spent six months figuring out how the building's electrical system would handle 36 sewing machines and sergers and six ironing boards, all at one time. "We had to get a blueprint of the building, and find out how many amps the machines took," she said. She brought in two 5,000-watt, gasoline-powered generators to boost the power supply.
