February 17, 2006
I'm sorry for the delay on writing this post, it has taken a while to write. This was another one of my favorite days. We woke up prayed, had breakfast; you know, the usual morning stuff. We split into...3 groups I believe. The roofing crew, the drywalling crew, and the Distribution Center crew! I was on the Distribution Center crew. We were taken to a group of huge tents across the road from the beach, the tents looked like circus tents. We walked into the biggest tent, let our eyes adjust from the bright lights outside to the darker inside. When our eyes had adjusted we saw rows and rows of clothing racks in about one quarter of the tent. Another quarter was an area where people could sit or stand around. And the rest of the tent was shelves of food. This was the area our group was helping in, the food section. It was set up like a mini-grocery store, but it sorta looked like a warehouse, almost more like Costco, or Sams Club.
We were given directions, and informed on how the system worked. When people come into the tent they come to a registration table, they show a photo identification and it is marked on the computer that they have come, (each person is allowed to come once a week), and once they are registered they will be given a big red bag, then they bring their red bag to the next table. At this table they hand in their red bad and they are given a binder, this binder contains a list of all the items in the 'mini-grocery store'. The lists are covered with plastic so that when they check off the list with dryerase markers and then erase them when they go to the next person to use. After they have checked off their list they hand it back to us and we take it to the 'mini-grocerystore' and we fill the orders, placing all the items in their red bag. Then when we finish we bring it back to the customers and if they want we can bring it to the car for them.
This type of service was not something I had ever done before...although its not like I had ever put on a roof, or drywalled...but this was different, it was interacting with people on a whole new level. We were filling their basic life-giving needs. Everyone needs food, and we were giving it to them, for free. It was so rewarding bringing their bag to their car. This was such a great time to reach out to people. Often the people didn't even need any prompting, they would just start to spill their stories out to us. Some people became very emotional, crying as we would hug them and tell them that we would pray for them. Also, when we were working we saw people of all ages that had been affected, we saw the elderly all the way to the little children coming in with their parents. One little girl that I remember especially, she was probably about 5 or 6, she was looking at the list of items with her mom, and when she saw the chicken noodle soup on the list she became very excited, she said 'oh mom, can we get chicken noodle soup? Please mom?" The mother said yes and checked it off. I was the one that filled that order, Not very many items were checked off, so I put in a few extra cans of chicken noodle soup for the girl. I didn't get to see her later, but something tells me she enjoyed it.
When we first began filling the orders it was a slow process. We had yet to learn where every item was. By lunch though we had all had each item at least once to know where it was. Lunchtime was our busiest time of day, we had piles of binders waiting to have their orders filled, we stopped and had lunchbreaks in groups of two, but everyone was a bit reluctant to stop working. Simone and I worked until there was only one binder left, then we decided that we would have time to take a short break.
This is the end of Part One of Day Seven. I'm getting this part out to you so that you can still keep informed since I don't yet have time to finish writing this post, enjoy this and i'll post part two ASAP!
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