Gary Brandenburger, of Florissant, Missouri, began supporting Meds and Food for Kids in 2007 as an early board member. When asked this winter to help fund a new position, he did not hesitate. Gary and his wife, Carla Duncan, and three other founding board members came together to give MFK the ability to hire a community health worker.
The community health worker will travel to remote areas to find malnourished children and refer them to clinics. They will check back to make sure they have been treated and cured, and then return in three to six months to visit them and assess their family situations to see whether they might become malnourished again.
“We very much support the people of Haiti,” Gary says. “It is important to us that MFK reaches children in rural areas, and this new position will make that more achievable.”
Gary and Carla feel a moral obligation to help the people of Haiti.
“The history of the U.S. and French involvement in Haiti is nothing to be proud of, and we both feel strongly that it is our responsibility to help Haitians,” Gary says.
Carla also supports MFK because she is “in awe of how Dr. Pat Wolff operates.” Carla calls Dr. Wolff an inspiration and a humble servant.
When Gary started on the board, Dr. Wolff and her team were grinding peanuts in a rented house in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. He was on the board when the factory was built.
“The board was all the right people doing the right things,” he says.
Those same people continue to do the right thing as they contribute to the future of Haiti and MFK.