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.