Food Delivery and Lots of Gardening!

On one of the final days of our service trip, our team had the opportunity to dig in and do some hard work. We arrived in the morning to the Christ’s Hands Food Pantry to organize some of their dry food. We received an inspirational speech from one of the directors of the food pantry, Brian, about the importance of the pantry to people in the community and the importance of giving back. This invigorated our group and reminded us of our purpose on this trip. We split into two groups, one group organizing pasta and the other group lifting and loading boxes of a truck. We were surprised to see the large storage room at the food pantry and all of the dry food that they had in storage. The previous days we had been serving food in the main room and had not realized the extent of Christ’s hands rooms. The pasta group had a nice time splitting large boxes of pasta into small bags that could easily be distributed to families. It is important to Christ’s Hands mission that their food is as accessible and usable as possible. They know that a portion size bag of pasta given to dozens of family is more useful than a giant box of pasta given to one family. The other group helped unload a truck full of donations and organize these new boxes.

Cole, Adria, and Julian riding the delivery truck back to Christ's Hands

After working at Christ’s Hands, our group returned to the Church to eat lunch. The weather was nice and sunny today, if not a little bit cold. We had been asked by the leader of the church to help around the church, and because of the nice weather we were asked to do some landscaping. We weeded all of the gardens around the church and also remulched the flower beds.

A group of participants removing weeds like pros

Cole teaching the kids how to mulch a flower bed

              

Today our group did a lot more manual and difficult labor. We were reminded of the true nature of service, hard work! This hard work that we did for many hours gave us time to quietly and verbally reflect on our experiences. We had many conversations among each other about what we had learned on the trip and we thought about the community a lot. It was good after receiving so much knowledge and so many experiences from the community to be able to dig in and give back.