PERU — For student Kaeden Swan, organizing a food drive for his first attempt at an individual community service project was an experience that far exceeded his expectations.

“I’ve never done anything like this,” said the Dirigo High School junior who attends the Region 9 School of Applied Technology in Mexico. “I was just going with it, praying about it, making sure that I wasn’t just doing it blindly, completely asking for help and stuff.”

When the two-week effort concluded, students from four schools — Dirigo High School, T.W. Kelly Dirigo Middle School, Dirigo Elementary School and Region 9 — had collected 4,000 food and personal care items.

On Feb. 9 at 7:30 a.m., Kaeden; his brother, Clayton; his dad, Dirigo Elementary Principal Charlie Swan; and Emma Chapman of the National Honor Society at Dirigo High School traveled to the United Baptist Church of Peru Food Pantry to unload the items from a truck.

As they headed over to the church, Kaeden said he wasn’t sure if they could get everything into the pantry before school. Fortunately, pantry Director Karen Eastman and her crew of David Wolstencroft, Mark Small, Dan Small and Colleen Bernard provided the assist.

Nghia Ha, a member of Friends of River Valley, a centralized resource for funding, support and partnership with existing programs and organizations, also lent a hand. She had with her an oversized check representing the $1,000 Friends of River Valley donated for the first thousand items the students collected. Those funds also went to the food pantry.

As it was, the group needed 20–25 minutes to unload everything and bring it into the food pantry.

“Wow, did they ever come through. This is such a help to us,” Eastman said.

She said the food pantry, which partners with the Good Shepherd Food Bank, serves up to 200 people a month.

Eastman said it has been a little rough this winter at the food pantry, especially when SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) was halted.

“That caused kind of a panic and we had a real surge of people, and we were serving up to 240 people at that time. It’s kind of gone back to more of a norm for us, like 200,” she said.

The pantry serves Dixfield, Mexico and Rumford primarily.

“It’s just nice to know that they see that we’re helping them and they have helped us back in return,” Eastman said.

With the realization that this project went better than expected, Kaeden said it felt amazing.

“Doing it as an NHS project is a little bit of an incentive, but just seeing the smiles on people’s faces when we were unloading it and how happy everyone was just working together getting all the boxes out,” Kaeden said.

“I went to the food pantry two weeks before we did the drive. I took some photos and a video that we sent out to all the classrooms. I made a list of everything we needed to put in the food drive.”

Kaeden said they set a goal of about a thousand items, unsure if they would get there.

“It ended up being something really close to my heart,” he said. “As the food drive kept going, seeing and hearing about all the food coming in, it felt great. I’m so grateful to everyone putting together the support and everything.”

His father said the breakdown of items collected by schools was led by the elementary school, which had 2,300, including nine classrooms collecting more than a hundred items.

Region 9 collected more than 1,000, with 460 from the middle school and 238 from the high school. He said the class from each school that donated the most items will win a pizza party, which will take place after the school break. That will be funded by a combination of different groups.

“Dixfield, this area, will always be my home. And I love it to death,” Kaeden said. “Whenever a community gets together like that and does something like this, it’s just amazing.”

He suggested the food drive might be something that should be done annually in the future, “or maybe firewood during the summer. Cutting a bunch of it and actually delivering to the houses where they need it.”

Eastman said the food pantry at 98 Main St. is open Tuesdays from 9-11:45 a.m. Patrons should bring their shopping bags. There’s also a Sheltering Wing clothing room.

“They can come every week for a bag of vegetables, bread and pastry, and anything on the table that they can use. And once a month, they can get a food box,” Eastman said.