Food for Lane County

Katie D.

November 22, 2009 - 3:04 PM

I love doing volunteer work. I always have. There's just something about it that makes me feel really awesome. I get into a semi-competitive groove and work like mad to get things done as quickly and efficiently as possible. That's how I feel when I'm at Volunteers in Medicine and how I felt on my mission trip in Belize, when we worked on the final stages of a pre school, putting up the ceiling, painting the kitchen, constructing and finishing desks, and generally getting things put together.

The summer after high school I volunteered at a food bank in Denver once a week, on the day that they had a produce and perishables distribution. I'd get there early and set up tables in an outdoor courtyard, a line would start to form, and then the trucks would roll in and we'd be drowning in vegetables and juice bottles and day-old bread. I loved that part: that every week we had some different combination of food to hand out and that we would have to frantically arrange things in the courtyard, put quantities on each food, and then usher people through and let them pick out their food. I felt like the Organizer Supreme, directing traffic and keeping the tables stocked. But I was also a volunteer speaking with people as they moved through the line, and week after week I would see the same faces and start to learn names. I wore a necklace one of the clients gave me consistently every week, and wear it still as a kind of rosary: it is a necklace of brown wooden beads on a black shoestring. I'd pull the beads through my fingers while working through food quantities or listening to people's stories from the past week. It was a fabulous job.

While I love the face-to-face time that I had in that position and at jobs like Volunteers in Medicine, I also honestly love the hard work that doesn't involve anything except moving things around. I love volunteering somewhere that my whole job has to do with sorting cans or stacking boxes.

Food for Lane County is a fabulous place for me. I wish I could spend much more time there than I do: there is such a variety of volunteer positions and opportunities. For any of you not from Eugene, Food for Lane County is a central food bank that supplies most of the food distribution around Eugene. They receive donations of non-perishable foods, as well as repackaging excess food from restaurants (especially the University of Oregon cafeterias), packaging and distributing bulk donations, running soup kitchens and packing lunches for school kids, and growing their own organic produce in volunteer-run gardens. They work with churches, schools, food banks, and other organizations. Social services around Eugene (like the women's shelter and homes for people with mental illnesses) rely on them for the food they supply their clients. It is a fabulously organized and incredibly beneficial place.

Last Tuesday I went with the Wesley Center [ link www.uowesleycenter.blogspot.com ] to volunteer as a group. This is the third year we've gone, and we are hoping to go twice more before the end of the school year. It's a fabulous thing to do as a group: you have time to socialize as usual, but it's conversation on your feet, keeping your hands busy.

Our job was repackaging a huge container of dry oatmeal into small bags that could be distributed to individuals. We went through two one-ton bags of that stuff. We labeled all the small bags and boxes with nutrition information with stickers, then scooped small bucketfuls into the bags, sealed them, packed them into small cardboard boxes, and sealed those. They were then taken into the warehouse, which is a huge room filled with food to be distributed.

I loved it. The whole thing. There's something so soothing about the kind of work that is just moving through a process. I spend almost all my normal life in heavy cerebral mode: studying, listening to speakers and the news, interpreting, writing, and on and on. Putting stickers on those bags was an amazing opportunity to do something I thought was important while also allowing my body to take over while my brain checked out. And I'm fast. It's sort of a silly thing to be proud of, but once I get moving I am the queen of the assembly line. Set it up, move it along. I might have even made some of my friends a little nervous as my suppressed Control Freak side stepped up and got everyone going. But man, we moved that oatmeal.

The other thing I appreciate so much about Food for Lane County is knowing that all the volunteers that work on each project add up to something that is hugely important and efficient. The end recipients of that oatmeal will get a box with my small contribution along with cans of vegetables, fruit, and protein, bags of dried beans and pasta, fresh organic produce, and milk. The oatmeal is just one part of it. But it's a part I laid my hands on, a part I moved along. And that is an incredible blessing, if you ask me.

Plus that good ache of having worked hard at the end of a day is such a great feeling. After weeks of the cramped ache of crouching over a computer or neck pain from bending over classroom notes, it's nice to feel like I've strained the arm muscles while getting someone fed.

This is the season, readers. I'm sure there's a Food for Lane County-type place somewhere near you. I highly recommend a couple of hours sorting cans. Drop off some non-perishables, go in and chop vegetables for a soup kitchen, work in a garden. It's good work, and it is work that is so worth doing. You'll feel better at the end of the day. I always do, anyway.