Second Harvest, Crisis Control and Salvation Army: a very brief overview
Sometimes apparently unimportant tasks can be as meaningful as tasks which are supposed to be the most important ones. But as we have learned from our recent experiences at the Second Harvest food bank and at the Crisis Control Ministry the food and drink that those in real need of help receive from those charitable souls at the several shelters for the poor and homeless around Winston-Salem doesn’t get there by art of magic. Extensive works of sorting out the donated food and drinks are of vital importance in order to make sure that these homeless individuals might have meals of a minimum quality, for one thing that we must not forget from our comfortable socio-economical positions is that these people freezing out in the streets each winter and starving to death every day in one of the main political superpowers nowadays, the USA, is that they are as human as us, and in many occasions and if we took the time to talk with some of them, we would find out that they are even more human than we are. They are human beings, and so they have needs, which as homeless people, are not covered.
Probably that’s the reason for why most, or all of us, were disappointed after our visits to both Second Harvest and Crisis Control. We were very interested on getting to know both how the volunteers work and how getting to work with these homeless people is. We only got to deal with one of the many tasks involved in the chain of events that begins with the donation of the food at churches and other places and that ends with the final servings of meals for the homeless. That is, sorting cans. Though I believe we are all quite aware of the importance of this task as well as of the fact that someone needs to do it, and we’re not precisely qualified to carry out tasks such as working at a pharmacy or attending interviews to potential volunteers, it is also true that we feel that we didn’t really get the big picture of how all the machinery of the organization fits together. We just got a sip of it, working for three hours tediously sorting cans.
That’s why we’re now focusing on developing a business model for what could well be called “voluntourism” around our own hometowns. But that will be explained in other occasion.
Moving onto today, we had the opportunity to play with some kids from the Salvation Army who came today to Wake Forest University to visit us. We divided ourselves into groups based on the geographical localization of the countries that we represent and then we received different bunches of very excited children handing their own cardboard passports which we gladly signed as they came into our rooms. We had a real lot of fun playing supposedly “typical games” from our countries, and then we waved to them as they left Wake Forest in their buses.
In conclusion we’ve been exploring different fields of volunteering, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing in the next few days.
So stay tuned!
