Putting faith in action through meat canning

Elaine Dueck, 15, eagerly anticipates the annual 64-hour around-the-clock meat canning operations when Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) mobile meat canner comes to her home community.

As she washes, dries and labels cans, she reflects on the unforgettable images of poverty and devastation of the Haiti earthquake.

“When I saw the pictures of all the orphans and people who needed help in Haiti I started to cry,” recalls Dueck. “I just felt that God was telling me that I could do something to help others.” Dueck, along with 18 other students from Valley Mennonite Academy near Winkler, were among 300 volunteers who shared their time and skills to fill, cook, clean, seal, label and pack 22,000 cans of pork chunks in late November.

“As teachers, we always look for activities where students can put their faith into action,” says Trudy Wiebe, a teacher at Valley Mennonite Academy.

Winkler is one of more than 30 canning sites in Canada and the U.S. where thousands of volunteers assist MCC’s canning crew with preserving about half a million cans of turkey, beef and pork for hungry people around the world, says John Martens, chair of the Winkler meat canning committee.

Ten percent of the cans preserved at the Winkler canning site stay in Manitoba where they are distributed by food banks. The remainder is distributed by MCC worldwide in places where people are experiencing war, disaster and malnutrition.

In Manitoba, the meat is donated or purchased through financial donations and deboned and cut by the staff of Winkler Meats, a meat processing facility that donates its facilities for this meat canning operation.

Volunteers of all ages work six-hour shifts. This is the second year that Alyssa Unrau, 14, of Plum Coulee worked alongside her grandparents, David and Margaret Reimer. Her grandfather was instrumental in bringing MCC’s mobile meat canner to Winkler in 2002.

Students and staff from Milltown Academy, a Hutterian Colony School near Eli, have volunteered annually for five years. “We can’t solve all the needs in this world but each one of us can do a little bit,” says principal Ron Kleinsasser.

This is the fourth year that Dueck worked a shift with her classmates. When she learned that a night shift needed more volunteers, she also worked a night shift. “My hands look like prunes but it is for a good cause,” she says.