Nearly eight tons of food was processed, packed and shipped from Pine Grove Baptist Church in Rockingham Saturday following a week-long collection to support Haitian relief efforts.

“The community really showed up and helped support as well as they could,” said Nicole Blake, project coordinator and member of the church.

According to Blake, the 218 5-gallon buckets weighed 15,886 pounds. Each included cooking oil, bags of rice, beans, flour, noodles, peanut butter and canned sugar.

Canned sugar ended up the hardest to come by, according to Blake. Some grocery store managers reported supplies of canned sugar dwindled by the middle of the week.

Blake says she notified area markets of the project, but increased demand left some shelves bare. Lowe’s in Rockingham didn’t sell out of buckets, but Saturday morning it had sold out of the matching lids.

Friends and supporters from Laurinburg donated several cases of canned sugar after quantities dropped in Richmond County to ensure every bucket was complete and ready to ship by Saturday.

In addition to the buckets, the community gathered 45 cases of water and donated $1,500 toward shipping costs. The church also collected 200 pounds of food that fell outside of the guidelines and it will be donated to Richmond County soup kitchens.

“We did very well for a county our size,” Blake said. “Saturday was an awesome day.”

From Richmond County, the buckets made their way to Red Springs to a centralized collection point at the North Carolina Baptist Mission Camp. They will wait there until Friday or Saturday before departing with other buckets collected from the region, Blake said.

From there, all the buckets will be shipped to Miami and then to Haiti.

One bucket should feed a family of four for two weeks.

Each bucket contained about $30 worth of food. That wasn’t lost on Blake.

“For Richmond County, $30 is a lot of money for people living paycheck to paycheck,” she said.

She said there was one group of widows from Roberdel Baptist Church that felt the need to give.

“Their class has a little ceramic church and they put pocket change in it from week to week,” Blake said. “They decided to count it up and donate it. There are only five of them, and they didn’t have much, but they decided to give it for the buckets program.”

Between 154 children and donations from their parents, the daycare classes at Second Baptist Church collected 23 buckets.

“We didn’t know we would have so much,” said Regina Wright, director of the daycare program. “We were overwhelmed.”

According to Wright, they try to help out with two mission projects a year.

Southwood Pentecostal in Rockingham contributed 33 buckets.

“I didn’t know if we were going to get one or 100,” said Johnny Autry, elder at Southwood Pentecostal.

Each bucket was brought in by a member or family of the congregation throughout the week.

“We encourage people to reach out and help someone else,” Autry said. “Whether they’re in Haiti, Chile or in East Rockingham.”

Staff writer Bryan Stewart can be reached at 997-3111 ext. 15 or by e-mail at bstewart@yourdailyjournal.com.