Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

near Nicopol (April 7). On May 2 feeding was begun in Tiege Volost (Sag- radovka); on May 6 in several villages in Kriwoy-Rog Volost (Greenfeld). The latter two places had a smaller percentage of needy, as did also Memrik (May 16) and New York (Nemyetskaya Volost May 20). METHOD OF ORGANIZATION AND WORK The unit or organization was usually a Volost, cor- responding to several townships and having as many as twenty thousand inhabitants scattered in five to twenty villages. A Volost committee was appointed, which was responsible to the Alexandrowsk office of the A.M.R. for all feeding work done in the Volost. In each village there was a committee, responsible in turn to the Volost com- mittee. The village committee arranged for the kitchen, chose the neediest people according to specific A.M.R. instructions, procured food supplies from the Volost ware- house, and proceeded to issue to those needy people their one cooked ration daily. This was as nearly as possible, the standard A.R.A. ration of 778 calories 9220 grams of dry food, based on a weekly menu which varied some- ORGANIZING FEEDING OPERATIONS 2Aley, what with the supplies available, but which consisted, for the most part, of bread every day, cocoa twice weekly, beans once or twice weekly, and the rest of the time rice or corn-grits cooked with sugar and milk. The bread was nearly everywhere baked in biscuits weighing one-fourth of a pound. The other part of the ration filled an ordi- Statistics yolosts! or settienjents where the /A.M.A. opepateck Children Ped Yoly August September | October November | Oecember A. M. R. Ukraine Feeding Operations nary deep soup plate to the rim. One meal a day was not much, but the food was of such good quality and so well prepared that it brought the color back into the faces of the children and kept it there. In one village a record was kept of the weights of the children. After several weeks of feeding they began to gain, and continued to gain until their weight was about normal. Of the adults this was not so generally true. Some of them continued to lose in spite of the fact that they were getting their 218 FEEDING THE HUNGRY rations every day—at least that was true until spring gardens began to help out somewhat. The ration was based on the idea of supplementing, rather than of being the whole food supply for the day. Most of the people managed to get some other food a large part of the time, even though it was of poor quality. When one must figure in terms of thousands of hungry people, it takes close figuring. One ration costs about two and one-half cents, or $.75 a month. Even at that rate it took carloads of food every week for the work the A.M.R. was doing. METHOD OF SELECTING THE PEOPLE TO BE FED The difficulty of getting an adequate supply of food during the first ten months of A.M.R. operations made it necessary to keep the number of rations down to the