Doing this event was one of the highlights of my semester. It was held at this church in Ithaca. This was my first time ever in a church, and it was amazing. The architecture was gorgeous. I sat in the pews taking it all in. I was impressed by the turnout too. There were a few women wearing their hijabs. There were young kids, working adults, and senior citizens. It was really cool to see all these people from different backgrounds coming together. I think that age is an especially underrated dimension. I read that weekly church used to be the main way that kids interacted with people older than them, and now that doesn’t really happen anymore. I feel like I would like to know adults outside of just my teachers and family.

My job for the food part was holding the bag, weighing it, and adjusting the contents to get the weight just right — I think around 80 grams was the goal. I took our pipeline very seriously and tried hard to avoid being the bottleneck. I was pretty proud of the job that I did, and I’m glad that we ended up overshooting our target number of packages.

Parts of the event left a bad taste in my mouth, though. It felt like we were playing a game. Is it really the most efficient thing to ship boxes and boxes of raw ingredients to Ithaca, NY, have volunteers bag as much as possible for a single weekend, and then send it all back, and ship that out to Haiti? Certainly factory machines already do the mechanical work that we were doing in the food processing industry. Or, why not just send the food itself to Haiti? Was this all just so we could feel like we made a difference, because just giving a donation doesn’t feel satisfying enough? Either way, I don’t want to discount the organization or the work that we did. Whatever it is, it made a difference, it got some people in need fed.