Food Bank

 A couple Saturdays ago, the Peace Corps fellows did a morning volunteering at a local food bank. This food bank is pretty amazing. One of the things they told us is that a lot of their produce is donated from trucks that are smuggling drugs into the U.S. by hiding it in produce - when the drugs get confiscated, the produce comes to them. It's the largest food bank in Arizona, and it was HUGE. They do all kinds of stuff, like teaching gardening, and handing out snacks to kids to have over the weekends (when they probably won't get meals), and they're hosting a conference this week about closing the Hunger Gap. Here's a link to their site if you're interested.

So for our service project, we helped pack emergency boxes. They are SUPER organized there, and we each got a station, and boxes came down the line, and we put in the same food item for each box. In 4 hours, we packed 2570 boxes of food, which equals 42,000 pounds of food. For the first half, I was at the peanut butter station (weird picture above) with Andrea, another 1st-year fellow. Erin, another girl I'm getting to know here was next to us doing beans. We would toss in two jars of peanut butter in each box. The second half, I switched to Mac n' Cheese, and we would toss in 3 boxes of that. If you ever get those options, I suggest you go with Peanut Butter, the boxes of Mac leave gross blue dust on your hands.

Bus Riding

An international crew of bus riders!

One thing I'm doing in Tucson is interning at International Rescue Committee, which helps refugees settle in the United States. My main task is to teach them how to ride the bus. Here is today's bus riding group (except Mohammad, who is taking the picture.) You'll notice refugees don't tend to smile for pictures, but they are all having a great time. What could be more fun than waiting for a bus in 97 degree heat with a bunch of people you can hardly communicate with?  Seriously, they're loving this.

On the left there is mother (Monica) and son (Ata) from Afghanistan. The woman on the bench (Isabel) and the man on the right are from Cuba, and he (Juan) is just great. He asks all the other folks where they're from, if they think it's hot here, where they live, all kind of things, but mostly in Spanish, so the conversations are very short. I also love his hat, sunglasses, and bag, he looks just like a happy fatherly/touristy guy visiting his daughter at college or something. It's been great using my Spanish again with those folks to explain how the bus works. The rest of the guys on the bench are all Sudanese, two are named Mohammad (not including the Mohammad taking the picture) and the other one is Ahmed.

We get a new group every two weeks, so these guys will graduate and be expert bus riders in no time, and I'll be showing a whole new group how to take the bus!