Touring Christian Aid Ministries

On Tuesday of the week we were in Pennsylvania, most of our family made the trip to Ephrata to visit Christian Aid Ministries, one of our favorite organizations that provides humanitarian aid to needy families worldwide and crisis relief to devastated areas of the world.

There we first took a tour of the warehouse and chicken cannery.

Here, we observe the tons of beans, or rice or flour (we can't remember which it was) which had been delivered to be packed into smaller packages later on.

There are also huge bins of bundles of clothing, layette bundles, fabric and hygiene packs to be shipped abroad.

We were too late to actually see the chicken canning in progress, but we got to see the cans after the canning had been done. It was fascinating. We had never gotten to see how canned goods are canned. 

The chicken parts are packed into the cans by hand here at this cannery. Then the lids are put in by a special machine. Then those cans are piled into these round racks, about four high, I believe.

The racks of cans are then placed into these enormous pressure cookers. You can only see the top part of the cookers. The rest of the cooker is way down deep under the floor. They can stack three or four racks of cans in each cooker.

The noise of the cooker that was still canning was a roar.

Every fifteen minutes, this man comes in to check the pressure gauges and make sure that everything is okay.

We touched the cans that were still warm. After the chicken is canned, the cans go through a stamping machine, which stamps two rows of information including the date the chicken was canned, the date of expiration, and a code number that stands for the CAM chicken cannery. Anywhere in the world, they can tell when and where a can of chicken has been canned by the info stamped on the lid.
The cans are then stored for ten days before being checked to make sure they are okay, and certified.
Then the cans are labeled by hand with CAM's paper label around them.
Even older Mennonite folk from local nursing homes will come in to help with the gluing of the labels that go around the cans.

We took a quick break to get a cup of hot cocoa and buy a bit of snack in the kitchenette before heading to the warehouse to help bag cornmeal.

A small group was beginning to help bag. I was tickled to see other moms with children helping. We all had to don plastic head covers and plastic aprons.

The first step was to cut open a 50-pound bag of wholegrain cornmeal and scoop about 2 pounds of meal into a scoop. If you mounded it, it would be about the right amount.

Rose poured the meal through a funnel into a plastic bag that Danny would hold under the spout.

Crystal weighed the meal and made sure it came within a few hundredths of an ounce toward 2 pounds.

Then Jonathan and Carrie would twist the bags closed and tape them securely closed with a special taping gismo.

Hannah had fun holding the bags under the funnel for me.

Quite an assembly line was working. It was lovely to have a cappella hymns playing while we worked!

We wished we could have stayed longer, but we hadn't gotten any lunch, and our friends the Bylers were expecting us. There was an air compressor hose to blow our clothes off.

Hannah gets tickled with the air blowing the cornmeal out of her clothes.

On our way out, I asked permission to snap a photo of these ladies sorting and folding fabric to ship.

We had hoped to help pack some hygiene packets to donate to CAM when we came back for Thanksgiving, but the relatives had already done that project, so we just delivered them all to a receiving area there at CAM.

I loved this scene across the parking lot, where Amish buggies were parked next to the semi truck container.

Bro. Wilbur and Sis. Darlene Byler,  president of Mission Helps,  don't live far from CAM. It was a real treat to get to stop in to visit them. They had ordered pizzas in, and had chips, apple cider and ice cream. At three in the afternoon, we were just plain starved! How good those hot pizzas were! We highly recommended that they visit CAM, because they hadn't ever been inside the door, and really didn't know that much about it.

I got this snap of Bro. Byler showing Jonathan the newest "Servant" newsletter.

Meanwhile, the lady folk visited in the sitting area.

So grateful for these dear friends!

You can see a replica of a jet on the book shelf in the background. Bro.Wilbur has been a jet pilot for a private airline until he retired recently.

Loved their beautiful back yard and the cardinal in the middle of these bare branches.

Waving goodbye as we left.

I drank in the beauty of country scenes and colorfully decorated homes like this one as we traveled through some of my favorite countryside.

We are so blessed to know servants of the Lord like the Bylers, and like all those who make Christian Aid Ministries the incredible ministry that it is today.