Sacramento Area Food Bank

We had another day of community service where we actually got to go out and do something hands on. Our group went to one of the satellite locations of the Sacramento Food Bank. The place we went was more of a warehouse / mother center. There was no soup kitchen or really any food there, but it did have a lot of other things. It had a couple of ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms, some rooms to help young adults get there GED, and then a bunch of other rooms to help expecting mothers. They had clothes, baby formula, and diapers to hand out to the mothers if they went to weeklys meetings. The more meetings they would go to, the more supplies they could take home.

Our group helped redesign classrooms, we sorted through hundreds of clothes, built shelves, cleaned up the outside play area, unpackaged and labeled dates for baby formula and bagged diapers.

When I was told I would be working in a warehouse sorting through diapers and baby formula I wasn't to excited. The feeling only got worse when I found out the baby formula was packaged in like 10 layers of plastic and cardboard. However we did find a way to make it fun.

This is going to sound random but I promise I will link these stories together in the end. We watched a motivational movie the other day about the Pike Place Fish market in Seattle. They had four main motiviational tools that they said people should try and use everyday: Choose your attitude. Play. Make their day. Be Present! The main thing I got out of this is that no matter what is going on in your life and what you have to do that day, you can always make it fun and you can always choose your attitude. People would come from all over to see these guys work at the Fish Market, because they made it fun. They would throw fish around, yell at eachother, talked to the customers and so on. If they can get up at 4am and have that much fun, then so can I.

Long story short, we found a way to make working in the warehouse fun. We played games, listened to music and threw things around (mostly bags of diapers). The people that worked there would keep coming in because we would make them laugh and smile. They wanted us to come back because we aparently made a large dent in the amount of work they had to get done, but sadly we won't have enough time.

Two more weeks until Camp Hope!


Pikes Place Fish Market... www.pikeplacefish.com

Camp Hope

Hey guys, so this will be a very short blog but we found out today where we are going on our first strike. Green Team 2, along with I think seven or eight other teams will be heading down to Louisiana to go work at Camp Hope (right near New Orleans). While other teams will have different duties our team is going to man the kitchen. What this means is that all 12 members of Green Team 2 along with a couple of professional chefs (hopefully 3 or 4) will cook for an estimated 500 volunteers a day. I'm pretty excited about the idea yet also really scared. I was hoping to do some manual labor like construction or destruction but they say we should be able to do some on the weekends or our off time for ISP hours. Either way it will be good to get back to the gulf. Our team will be split into two groups, one to work the morning shift (4am-noonish) and the second to work the 2nd shift (noonish till 7ish). As you can probably tell I don't have all of the details yet so I'm still lost on a couple of things.

But here is the web site for what I believe is Camp Hope. Its called the New Orleans area Habitat for Humanity... http://www.habitat-nola.org/index.php

I'll keep you guys all up to date with everything else as soon as I find out more information.

-Matt