KALAMAZOO, Mich. — Wednesday morning, Dr. Mike Famiano was about to begin an interview with FOX 17 when a friend drove up to his home in Portage with a trunk full of bags of food.
His friend then got out of his car, opened the hatch and pulled out a several bags that he quickly stored in Dr. Famiano’s garage.
“A lot of people will donate a bag of groceries. Some people donate a whole truckload of groceries,” Dr, Famiano said during the interview. “We had a local church who did a food drive for us. And, that’s why I can’t park in my garage right now.”
Half of Dr. Famiano’s garage was filled with food and household items: peanut butter, jelly, juice, coffee, canned pasta, canned vegetables, soup, cereal, toilet paper and several cases of water.
He said he was collecting foods and giving them away to students still living on and around Western Michigan University, where he teaches physics.
“As a professor at the university I used to think my job was to dump knowledge into people’s heads,” Dr. Famiano said. “But you kind of realize that these are real people. They have real needs. And all of sudden those needs are magnified 10-fold because things are little weird right now.”
Dr. Famiano said many of the students who are still on campus are international students who lost their school-related jobs when the university moved classes online and went on lockdown.
He added that a lot of them don’t have cars to go grocery shopping.
So, he and a handful of other faculty and community members created the group
