Food for Egyptian Children

Heroes Remember

Food for Egyptian Children

Transcript

We enjoyed giving them little things. Like, we had little cans over there, again about four inch round, about two inch high. Disc chocolate, there’d be five or six disc chocolate, like a molasses cookie say, the size, chocolate and packed in 1942. You would open it up and it was as white as your sheet of paper there, chocolate. It was chocolate as it is chocolate brown, and they were harder than heck but still chocolate. We’d give it to the kids, we’d open them up, we had these little tiny can openers. We always carried one on our dog tag, chain, so we’d give them a can and we’d show them how to operate it and let them go home with it, the kids. When we moved in Rafah, in April mid April of ‘57, we were in this camp of Raffa and kids would come near the fence bumming food, and they wanted, “Mungoria, Mungoria!!”, they’d say, “I’m hungry!” Their word was Mungoria. So we’d give them things. Rations that we had, when we went on trips they’d give us a ration pack, you had like five packs, little packs about, a little bit smaller than a car battery say. And five of them would be in one big box so we’d call them five in ones and each pack was a one man ration pack for 24 hours. You’d have like a book of matches to light your little stove and you had a little fuel thing that you could light, ignite to get a little fire going to heat up your water for tea or you got a little envelope of coffee and a tea bag and an envelope of sugar in it. Then you had a little tin of apricots or something, maybe a little tin of beans, another little tin could be two wieners cut up or something, you know.

Description

Mr. Perry describes the type of ration packs they had to share with the starving children.

John Perry

Mr. John Perry was born October 30, 1936 in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He came from a large family of nine children. During his teen years, he worked on fishing boats and local farms as a labourer and at age 17 decided to travel to Halifax to join the army. He accepted training in Camp Borden and spent two years in Manitoba. Too young to join the Korean War, Mr. Perry became part of the United Nations Emergency Force where he travelled to Egypt and worked in the motor transport area as a motor transport driver. After military service, Mr. Perry used his knowledge in motor transport and held various positions with the motor vehicle branch of provincial government. With 38 years service, Mr. Perry retired and settled with this family in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

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