TIFTON — At 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday, the first car rolled up to the gates of Charles Spencer Elementary School. Peggy Cooper turned off the engine and bundled herself up with blankets. Her family was determined to be the first of 399 other families fed that day.

The sixth annual Manna Drop took place Nov. 17 at Charles Spencer, where bags of food were given to families for an early Thanksgiving. The project this year was led by five Abraham Baldwin Agriculture College students who organized and raised the funds for the event. Those students were Cheyenne Colson, Jonathan Kroner, Landon Rowe, Lane Riley and Loren Lindler.

A total of $9,000 went towards the event this year. Every bag contained a five-pound ham, a box of cornbread mix, two pounds of rice, green beans, corn and other can goods donated by food drives in the community.

ABAC’s Baptist Collegiate Ministries volunteered to distribute the food.

All the food this year was given out only after an hour and 15 minutes of distribution. Around 150 cars lined the perimeter of around Charles Spencer and another hundred waited on foot before they began handing out bags.

“I think this probably the most people we’ve ever had,” said Lane Riley, an Abraham Baldwin student, and veteran of the Manna Drop. “I think people definitely needed it more this year than they had in past years.”

The crowd may be a ripple-effect caused by Hurricane Michael according to Ardi Sell, one of the first people in line.

“[The power outages] melted all the stuff in our freezers and our insulin and things. I live by myself and all I could do is pray and ask the Lord for help. But those linemen couldn’t do nothing because of the power being down all over town.”

Sell stays at Sunnyside Apartments and has lived in Tifton all her life. She says she worked at a nursing home for 47 years as a geriatric nurse but was let go.

Despite all this, she finds solace saying, “I love Jesus, and my mom and daddy may have gone home, but I’m waiting until it’s my time to come home, too.”

The crowd may also be caused by simple word-of-mouth. Jesse Strayer heard about the event while watching WALB in the hospital. He had spent 10 days recovering from pneumonia in the integrated comprehensive care (ICC) program.

He has lived in Georgia for 40 years with his wife but the two of them have recently hit hard times.

“We used to make $200,000 a year, my wife and I. We owned a trucking company in 2013. She was a teacher, too. Now we’re on disability making $35,000,” he said.

Manna Drop began as a challenge to students from the previous deans of the Stafford School of Business, Dill and Susan Driscoll. Since then, the Manna Drop has become a student-led project with only minimal help from faculty.

Tom Grant, an associate professor at Abraham Baldwin, serves an advisory role for the group. “The way this group works is that it’s not a club. It’s not an organization. It’s five students who put this whole thing together. And I sit in with them only because Dill used to sit in with them before,” Grant said, “And Johnny Evans is the one that handles the foundation stuff so the money is stored there. They raise all the money. They plan it all. They do everything.”

“It’s just Lane Riley and a couple of the kids who’ve said we got to keep doing this. I’m so proud of them,” Dill said. “The sad part is we’re living off of last year’s fundraising. We had a wonderful team headed up by Caroline Langdale and Madison Woodson. We’ve got to replace that for next year.”

Riley says they plan to continue the Manna Drop next year and try to increase the meal count to 450 or 500 after how many people came this year. If you’d like to help donate or raise funds for the 2019 Manna Drop, contact Lane Riley at his email, lriley2@stallions.abac.edu.