Running for A Cause!

Well hello again! Guess what? I didn't disappear off the face of the earth, I merely disappeared off the face of this blog. I hope you have had a good year without hearing from me.

You may have noticed this ChipIn thing above (Does anyone know how to get that to show on the side of my blog? I couldn’t do it). That's what brings me back to the blog, and hopefully will continue to keep me writing for awhile. I have been training to run my first marathon, and so far I have completed 10 out of 18 weeks of training. My original purpose in training was to prove to myself that I could do something I didn't think I could do, and to do something that I'd always wanted to do. As I have been training, though, I wanted to use all of this time and energy to benefit someone besides myself.

So here's what I have decided: I'm raising money for Feed My Starving Children. You can check out their website at www.fmsc.org. For those who haven't heard of them, this organization uses volunteers to package nutritious meals for starving people around the world. There are four ingredients in these meals, and the meals have been created by food scientists to meet the nutritional needs of a starving child for an entire day. The organization has partners in 67 countries who know who needs the food and knows how to best get it to them. You can read more about the partners at http://www.fmsc.org/page.aspx?pid=328. The organization is nongovernmental. They don’t partner with governments overseas and don’t receive funds from the United States.

Each meal produced costs 24 cents to make. My marathon will be 26.2 miles. So I thought I would raise money based on those numbers.

If you would like to contribute 1 cent per mile (.26 total), you will feed a child for a day.
If you would like to contribute 10 cents per mile ($2.60 total), you will provide about 10 meals.
If you would like to contribute $1.00 per mile ($26 total), you will provide 108 meals.
If you contribute $2.00 per mile, you will be donating an entire box of food, which is 216 meals for $52.
$5 per mile ($130 total) donates 541 meals, 2.5 boxes worth of food.
$10 per mile ($260 total) donates 1083 meals, about 5 boxes worth of food.

Here are some other descriptions from the Feed My Starving Children website of what certain donation amounts will provide:
$52 provides 216 MannaPack meals (1 full box)
$208 provides 864 meals for patients in a malnourishment clinic (4 boxes)
$855 will fill ½ pallet with MannaPack meals to support a mountain village (approx. 17 boxes)
$1710 provides an entire pallet of meals to be packed with His love (33 boxes)

I’ll take ANY donations, whether 1 cent, 1 dollar, or $10,000! You should know that ALL of the money donated will be given to Feed My Starving Children. I will not be taking any cut of the donations. I know a lot about this organization, so if you have any questions, just let me know!

I’ll also be keeping you posted through this blog about my training, the fundraising, and the marathon.