On Friday, October 2nd, Shelley, Mackenzie, and I volunteered for Moveable Feast in Lexington, KY.
We began the day about 4 pm with a long trip to K-lot (any UK student understands the dreaded 2 mile trek).
Just our luck, as soon as we got in Shelley's car it began to pour on us. Knowing that we had to drive in this and get out of the car to deliver the meals to each clients door, we immediately began to regret our decision to volunteer on that day...
BUT we sucked it up and went anyways.
Once we got to the main location for Moveable Feast, we started packing meals into GIANT bags. A main meal, salad, and dessert for each person. Although some people have "special meals" (may have a food allergy or only able to eat soft foods) and some of the neediest clients also get lunch for the next day.
Let me tell you, trying to load meals for the 26 homes on our route into Shelley's Charger is not an easy task...
After a lot of forceful shoving the trunk was finally stuffed full and pushed shut, and I was buried under bags in the back seat trying to put meals together and hand them to Mackenzie to take up to the doors.
I think the worst part of all of this was the trek through the pouring rain to each door...
It really stank when they didn't even answer the door.
It really started to get to all of us, but then we started to think about how much we were helping these people who may not eat if we didn't deal with getting a little wet to bring it to their door. Putting it into perspective definitely helped give us the motivation we needed to finish the next few hours of the route.
I can relate to your post because not all of the experiences I have had at my service site have been very fun, and I have also found myself wishing I had just gone another day. I can also relate to your thoughts that helping people makes it all worth it. Is delivering meals the main thing you guys get to do for your service site, or are there other ways you can help out there? And does your site require volunteers to drive routes and deliver meals every single day? If so, it seems like it would be difficult to get enough people to do that.
ReplyDeleteThey already have people who cook the meals everyday, so yes all they need us to do is deliver the meals. They need drivers for multiple different routes Monday-Friday. It is hard to find enough volunteers, but there are some people who are "on-call" for the days there aren't enough other drivers to deliver meals.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete