Care Moses Lake
Amy Dana, center, and Michaelle Boetger making sandwiches for the homeless on a Tuesday afternoon in the kitchen of the Elks Club. Both Dana and Boetger are volunteers with Care Moses Lake, which has provided sack lunches for the homeless since 2017.
Charles H. Featherstone
Michaelle Boetger spreads peanut butter on bread as her part in a sandwich-making assembly line.
Amy Dana, United States of America Mrs. Washington 2022, spoons jam onto bread as part of a sandwich-making process.
Care Moses Lake volunteers Pam Nordine, Amy Dana, Michaelle Boetger and Carol Bridges make sandwiches for the homeless on a recent Tuesday at the Elks Club in Moses Lake.
Sack lunches filled and ready to go.
Care Moses Lake volunteers Linda Maw (left) and Molly Meiners (right) stow finished sack lunches.
Care Moses Lake organizer and volunteer Michaelle Boetger stacks empty jars of peanut butter, all used up to make sandwiches for the homeless.
Care Moses Lake volunteer Linda Maw hauls a plastic container of lunch bags ready for delivery late Tuesday.
MOSES LAKE — Ten jars.
That’s how much peanut butter Michaelle Boetger went through on one Tuesday evening in mid-April as she was making sandwiches.
One-hundred and seventy sandwiches. For 170 sack lunches.
It’s something Boetger and a group of volunteers that call themselves Care Moses Moses Lake has done nearly every Tuesday since 2017, to provide a simple sack lunch — a peanut butter sandwich, a small cup of applesauce, a bag of chips, a snack, and a small box of juice — to organizations that hand them out to locals facing homelessness.
“We’ll be done in about 30 minutes. So it goes pretty fast,” Boetger said as she slathered peanut butter on six slices of wheat bread on a cutting board. “We’ve got a system down, and I think we’ve made 25,000 sack lunches over six years.”
The system is very simple.
After Boetger finished with the peanut butter, she handed the big plastic cutting board to Amy Dana, who spread globs of strawberry jam on the other slice. When Dana finished, she handed it over to Pam Nordine, who put the two slices together, then handed them on to Susanne White, who slid the sandwiches into resealable plastic bags. From there, those sandwiches were passed to Grace Meiners, who sealed the bags and placed them in a plastic container.
It’s a little assembly line of sandwich making in the kitchen at the Moses Lake Elks Club, repeated in the dining room as more volunteers take the sandwiches and put them in paper sacks with chips, apple sauce and a treat like a granola bar. They can make, fill and pack 170 sack lunches in about 20 minutes, Boetger said.
Because the old adage is true — many hands make light the work.
“It’s a service I can do while bringing my kids and they can help,” Nordine said.
“All of these guys are my regulars. They come here every Tuesday, and I can really count on them,” said Boetger, who owns a graphic design business.
Boetger said she started what has become Care Moses Lake in 2017 after seeing a request online from Serve Moses Lake — the aid and outreach organization of the Moses Lake Ministerial Association — for someone to provide sack lunches for Serve Moses Lake’s clients.
“And I thought I could do that. So I kind of rallied some friends and solicited some businesses and community members to pay for supplies, and so, for the last six years, we’ve been doing that,” Boetger said.
Since then, Care Moses Lake has grown into a proper nonprofit, delivering sack lunches to the city’s sleep center for the homeless, the Moses Lake Food Bank and Serve Moses Lake. Last winter, Care Moses Lake also started delivering hot soup once a week to the sleep center, snacks for kids during spring break at the Boys & Girls Club as well as children at New Hope.
“What (started as) care sacks in the very beginning kind of turned into Care Moses Lake,” she said. “Everything is care — care sacks, care bowls, care snacks.”
It takes a lot of supplies to keep things going, Boetger said, but community generosity makes it possible for Care Moses Lake to help with more than just sack lunches. The organization works with Grocery Outlet to both raise money and arrange food donations, and Care Moses Lake has an Amazon wish list with everything from granola bars to winter hats, socks, underwear and paper sacks.
In fact, Boetger hopes to put together a regional nonprofit showcase this fall, similar to the Moses Lake Chamber of Commerce’s business fair, which she’s informally calling a care fair.
“What I really want to do is to get all these nonprofits and all these service organizations in one location,” Boetger said. “Because I think people want to give back, but sometimes they aren’t sure how to.”
Because while it’s great if people can show up at the Elks Club at 814 N. Stratford Road every Tuesday at around 4:15 p.m. to help make sack lunches, Boetger said she knows that lots of people don’t have time. But just about everyone can find a way to give back to the community in some way.
“So, if you can donate financially, that’s even better, because a lot of nonprofits can stretch those funds,” she said. “Everybody can give back somehow.”
Linda Maw, who spent Tuesday stuffing bagged sandwiches into paper sacks, said she likes knowing that even her little bit of effort helps hungry people in the community.
“I’ve always volunteered doing something,” Maw said. “It’s all just helping other people.”
For more information, check out Care Moses Lake’s website at caremoseslake.com.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com
