New Year has arrived! And many of us are more than happy to embark the new year.

With a bit of sweat, and exercise for the weekend!

Due to rising epidemic spread in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, we have decided to reorganise the way how we pack our food by not craping everyone in the same place. Food packing stations by categories (hygiene, perishable, non-perishable) are arranged further apart so that volunteers could help with social distancing in place.

We are so grateful volunteers came a lot earlier this time from our usual packing time, while the rest of the team have not arrived, we have started to plan ahead how things will be so that we can be more efficient in packing to reduce the time in the storage room.

By 10 am most of the volunteers were already buzzling around getting categorised food packed into necessary bags. We had about 250 packs to get ready including the seaside aboriginal outreach team who came in to help along.

This month we were truly blessed with a lot of different types of sponsors, including surgical masks that are re-packed into 10s in order to give to the families who may not have disposable masks themselves.

Malaysian's iconic tea company BOH also came in with a surprise of over 4,000 sticks of tea sachets (with oat) that would truly bless the taste buds of every Malaysian family.

Our regular food distributor donors Lady's Choice and Knorr and new donors from Campbell and Carte Dor also came in for this month's distribution, especially the pudding where Chinese families can reserve it to be made and serve for the upcoming festive season Chinese (Lunar) New Year.

Our youngest volunteers in our team busily packing for special needs family with the extra bonus of tea and spreads, which most of these families hardly have a chance to enjoy. Learning to distribute fairly and mindfully have become part of their learning journey in life.

Once all the bags are readily packed, they will be placed with outreach name tags along the parking lobby, including re-packed jams (marmalades), fresh eggs, oil and rice; waiting for individual outreach teams to come and collect all the food that will be distributed to the needy families that are registered under the food bank.

We are so grateful to our volunteers that besides coming to help us, some even managed to source extra donations so that we are ready to help emergency impromptu families.

By the end of our packing, we are just so happy that all these food with 6 months - 1 year left of shelf life donated by the food distributors and manufacturers are distributed out to the families.

Every single month we are just so amazed with the love of the people for the hard stricken families, and we know that other than us there are also plenty more food banks out there of all different states and districts are doing the same to help those who are in need, all because of the heart of giving.

Be it physical voluntary or donations, nothing could happen without our wonderful volunteers, impact partners and outreach teams; and we pray and wish them the best of 2021

“ ‘ “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.” ’

Numbers 6:24-26

Angie Ng

Daily Bread Food Bank Director

disclosure: the Daily Bread Food Bank is part of a non-profit channel, collaborating with other NGOs including the latest Fresh Food Bank Initiative movement.

Where you can find us in mainstream media, look for @dbfoodbank or scan from the QR code below.