Yesterday we arrived at the UMCOR depot at 9:00 a.m. and met Jaime, the volunteer coordinator, who is a US2 missionary. (She is completing two years of service within the United States for the United Methodist Church.) She brought us to the (air-conditioned!) conference room and told us about the Salt Lake City Depot, which opened in May. Then she conducted a workshop for us that challenged us to think about the relationship between projects like mission trips and food drives and larger social injustices, like why people are hungry and cold and unable to get medical care.
Then we went back to the food co-op (which is right next door) to finish the meat sorting project we'd begun the day before. We had to fill partial orders, in which recipients ask for less than a case of something. For each order, we had to count out the appropriate amount of each kind of meat (chicken, pork, ribs, ground beef, sausage), box it up, and label the boxes. Lance, Jessica, and John worked most of the morning bringing cases out of the freezer for us to fill orders and then bringing packed orders back into the freezer, where they will be stored until distribution on Saturday. We're not done with this meat yet!
After lunch, which we ate in UMCOR's air-conditioned conference room, we went to work at the UMCOR depot, in the not air-conditioned warehouse. We were assembling flood buckets and school kits. We also delivered our donation of school kits. They were very welcome. Because the depot has just been opened, their first priority is to build up an inventory, so that they have supplies to deliver when there is an emergency. Lance, Jessica, Jackie, and I did two pallets of flood buckets, and Scott, John, and Ruth did a gross of school kits. This was a lot accomplished, and yet we know that these supplies go out in orders of five or six thousand when a community is in need, so there is still a lot to be done. We will go back this morning to do a little more.
In the evening, after dinner, Linda from Crossroads came to the church to do a workshop for us that shows us what kind of choices low-income families have to make to keep a roof over their heads, to eat, to get medical care, to have transportation, and to meet emergency expenses. We pretended to be a family of four with two small children. Both parents work at a minimum wage full-time job. Even at the barest minimum, with the cheapest place they could rent and not really enough food, they were barely making it. This helped us understand the people that Crossroads serves. Linda also told us some inspirational stories about people and families that Crossroads has been able to help thanks to the on-going support of its donors.
Ruth arrived safely at the UMCOR depot just as we finished lunch. We were very happy to have her join us at last. Now we are off to another day's work in the depot and a surprise birthday party for Scott.
--Rebecca
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