Giants’ Warner and Toomer Arrive in Indonesia on 2-Week NFL Trip with World Food Program
J. Ethan Medley, NY Giants
February 12, 2005
JAKARTA, INDONESIA — New York Giants’ Quarterback Kurt Warner and his wife Brenda met up with wide receiver Amani Toomer and his wife Yola at JFK Airport on Wednesday evening, along with several members of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and myself, to embark on a two-week trip to the tsunami-damaged regions of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Four planes (one missed connection), 12 time zones, countless miles, and 34 hours later, we arrived in Jakarta, where we were greeted by local members of the WFP, and taken to a local hotel to get some much-needed sleep.Tomorrow morning our group will leave from the local military airport with a UN Humanitarian Air Services flight and head to Banda Aceh, one of the worst-affected areas, where we will spend the next 3 days loading and transporting food to coastal towns, participating in cleanup efforts, playing games with local youth in displacement camps and meeting local US military personnel stationed here since the disaster.
Set-up in 1963, WFP is the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. In 2003, WFP fed 104 million people in 81 countries, including most of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people. Currently, WFP is helping to feed more than 850,000 people in Sri Lanka, with a large logistics network spread throughout the country. For more information on their efforts in Indonesia and throughout the world, please visit www.wfp.org.