STARKVILLE – It is about 10:30 on a sunny Saturday morning and the activity in a parking lot on the Mississippi State University campus has come to an abrupt stop.
A small crowd of volunteers have encircled a dwindling pile of sweet potatoes, but no one is grabbing the potatoes and stuffing into the mesh bags provided them.
“What is it?” someone asks form the back.
“A roach,” comes the answer.
“Where?”
The crowd, as one, peers into the pile.
“There it is!’ comes the cry a few moments later, followed in an instant by the distinctive crunch of a boot on insect, raising a chorus “Eew!”
Slowly, tentatively, the work resumes.
In another half-hour, well ahead of schedule, the last of 12 tons of sweet potatoes have been bagged and piled into the trucks of 15 agencies from around the Golden Triangle and beyond, where the sweet potatoes will go to food pantries or be turned into meals for the poor.
“It’s been a great success,” said Jamey Bachman, executive director for Volunteer Starkville, which organizes the annual Sweet Potato Drop.
“We bagged 2,400 10-pound bags this year, which is just great,” she said.
The event, billed as a Family Volunteer Day activity, attracted more than 100 participants, including students from MSU’s Maroon Volunteer Center, as well as from local businesses, churches, high schools and families.
“We had a great turnout and everybody really seemed to be having a good time,” Bachman said. “Of all of the events we have, this is one my favorites because it gets the whole community involved, especially families.”
Although Volunteer Starkville organizes the event, its success relies heavily on the relationships the group has built with other organizations, most notably the Mississippi chapter of the Society of St. Andrews.
The Society of St. Andrew is a national organization that helps feed America’s poor through a practice that dates back centuries – gleaning fields of crops and orchards after harvest or collecting crops that don’t meet top-grade quality to provide to the hungry.
According it its data, The Society of St. Andrew has collected more than 20 million pounds of fresh food.
In Mississippi, one of those crops is sweet potatoes.
“They work closely with the farmers in our state,” Bachman said. “This year, the Society of St. Andrew got donations from four farmers in Vardaman (known as “The Sweet Potato Capital of the World”), and they delivered a dump-truck load for us to bag and distribute. So we’re very grateful to the Society of St. Andrew and, of course, the farmers. And we so appreciate everyone who came out to volunteer.”
Among those volunteers was Sherrinda Bolton of Starkville and her son, Darius, 9.
“We found out about it from a neighbor,” Sherrinda Bolton said. “I thought it would be a good way to show Darius how important it is to help people who may not have enough to eat. It was supposed to be a way of giving back, but we’re having fun. You wouldn’t think putting sweet potatoes in a bag is something fun to do on a Saturday morning, but it is. Everybody’s having a good time.”
Bachman, who has been in charge of the Sweet Potato Drop since becoming director at Volunteer Starkville since 2012, said the potatoes will help feed the poor in Oktibbeha, Lowndes, Clay and Winston counties, along with one group from the Jackson area.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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