Asma: Journal 16

Today was more of a labor-intensive day filled with thousands of cans of green beans. We started off at the Cherry Street Mission and made an assembly line to transfer all the goods they needed for the Thanksgiving boxes to a truck. This process was made more interesting by all the people from Cherry Street who hung around outside to watch us. There was this one guy from the neighborhood who wasn't even a member of Cherry Street who demanded he get fed right then and there. He was told to leave - it wasn't even lunchtime yet! I was kind of surprised by the guy's persistence. He spent about 10 minutes trying to get past us into the building. Anyways, after we loaded the truck, we went over to LifeBridge (which is like Cherry Street's storage warehouse). We had to make another assembly line to get the stuff out of the truck and into the building, and then we had to place it all on the tables. Only after that did we start unpacking and sorting. One thing I noticed - there were so many cans. Goodness, I think I cleaned and sorted and boxed about 5,000,000 cans (exaggeration, I know). What made the process a little inefficient was that we had to individually wipe off every single can with a bleach rag to get all the dirt and nastiness off. A bit of a tedious process...although that helped us catch several cans that were actually expired! We also found "blonde" spiders in a box of green beans...O.o that's kind of gross. But even with multiple expired cans, the extreme abundance of food was pretty cool. Shows that people care enough to donate something to help others. That's a nice thought, right? And at least my efforts of cleaning/sorting/lifting will benefit a family who otherwise wouldn't have a Thanksgiving dinner. That makes it all worth it.