Tis the Season for Volunteering

Tis the Season for Volunteering! I have to start out by saying I love my Sweetie. I love him even when he makes me mad (which isn’t very often) and I love him especially when he plans wonderful things for our family to do (which is quite often). It’s usually planning fun trips, but a couple weeks ago, he planned a family outing to volunteer at the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina on a Thursday evening. Volunteering is something I’ve been meaning and wanting to do and so I was really looking forward to doing this with my family.

We were assigned to “greeters”. As “greeters”, helped people who came in to drop off donated food during their extended hours. We quickly learned our duties as a donation came the same time we did. Then, within minutes, we were on our own. Almost immediately, some young ladies dropped off a carload of food they collected from a food drive they organized. We moved their many plastic grocery bags of food from the loading docks to the GIANT scale in the warehouse. We were all excited to get busy. The load weighed in at a whopping 144 lbs of food! After writing up a receipt, we proceeded to move the food from the scales to the giant cardboard boxes. They were sorted by “Boxes” and “Cans”.

We did all that within 10 minutes and eagerly awaited more donations… and waited… and waited.

Well, let’s just say we kept ourselves creatively occupied for the rest of the 1 hour and 45 mins. Unfortunately, we just happened to come at a slow time. Much to our disappointment, we JUST missed a donation dropped off by about 30 high school students totaling 4000 lbs!!! WOW!

We had fun with the girls despite the lack of volunteer activity. We actually created our own, starting out with heel-to-toe racing against Daddy. Big Sis attempted plastic bag (collected from the donations drop offs) jump roping next. This proved to be a bit too difficult, so she and Little Sis decided to create wearable plastic bag fashions instead. Then they moved onto plastic bag limbo which turned to plastic bag high-jump once the limbo “stick” got too low. Never knew you could do so much w/ plastic bags!

Despite the lack things to do, I still feel like we helped out since we were left on our own within minutes. I feel like the girls got a taste of what it meant to volunteer your time to help others. We spoke with one of the directors for a bit and learned about how the food gets collected and distributed throughout the 35 counties across North Carolina. It’s seriously an amazing community effort that comes together to help fight hunger across these counties. And these guys try to make use of every resource available, as efficiently as possible. I was in awe.

The next evening, Friday night, Derek, one of the dads in Daddy and Big Sis’ Y-Guides tribe, arranged for the “Whirlybirds” to ring the Salvation Army bell at the food court entrance of a local mall. Daddy and Big Sis’ turn was the second of 5 forty-minute slots in the tribe. This was open to all family members so Little Sis and I got to participate, too. Yippee! Another thing I’ve really wanted to do!

We had fun ringing bells and chatting it up with fellow tribe-sters as well as those donating and passers-by. But we really started raking in the donations when the girls started belting out the those Christmas tunes. Thanks for the brilliant idea of Chris, the other dad there. The girls (ok and myself, too) had so much fun ringing and singing, singing and ringing that we ended up hanging out and helping out with each of the other time slots, too. So, basicially, we ended up ringing that bell from a span of 4:30 pm until around 7:45 pm, minus a dinner break. WHEW! Luckily, it was a beautiful night and we all had so much fun.

As if that weren’t enough, the following day, Saturday, was yet another volunteering event that the “Chief” arranged for his tribe, this time members only, at the Brown Bag Ministries of Apex where the girls and dads got to pack lunches and then go downtown to Moore Square in downtown Raleigh, NC to actually pass them out to the many homeless people there. This was what Big Sis found to be the most rewarding volunteering gig. It didn’t come without a lot of questions, but those questions mean that she’s thinking about the world around her and how there are people less fortunate than her and what she can do to help.

I so loved volunteering as a family that I really hope to try to make it a more regular occurrence, because what can be better than enjoying family time together while helping others! But Tis the Season for Volunteering!

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Christine, aka happyvballgirl : )

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