Volunteer

Four stories:

1. My grandmother was born in Poland in 1902.  She dropped out of school at 12 because she had to find work to support her family.   She came to America in the 1920’s and was a factory worker before her marriage.  She was left a widow with three children, the oldest only 11.  A single mother with no education, she struggled financially.  Yet every year before Passover, she’d go to the butcher, the grocer, the fishmonger, and ask for donations.  Not for herself, for “the poor people”. Feeding others was very important to her.

2.  One year during college I had a summer job at a cosmetics factory.  The company hired college kids to help put their fall and Christmas line together.  I spent my summer on an assembly line, labelling perfume bottles, dropping tins of eyeshadow into compacts, placing tubes of lipstick into boxes.

3.  Corporate America encourages its employees to contribute to charity.  Sometimes that means matching donations.  Sometimes it can be expressed in more practical terms.  I will never forget an experience about 30 years ago, when the head of my department and I were planting flowers as part of our company’s lark beautification project,

4. One of my favorite artists is Harry Chapin.  The first time I saw him in concert, he did a show at my high school, a fundraiser for World Hunger.

Why did I tell these stories?  What do they have in common?

Well …

My employer has partnered with Feeding America. The local affiliate is a food bank called Island Harvest.  Today a team from my office headed to the Island Harvest warehouse.  We spent the morning as volunteers.  Our project was to prepare food boxes which will be distributed to low-income senior citizens.  The boxes are packed on an assembly line.  My job was to place a can of pinto beans into each box.  The boxes also contained baked beans,  shelf-stable milk, oatmeal, a generic version of Cheerios, canned spinach, canned chicken, juice, peanut butter … nutritious and filling food.

It was exhausting physical work.  But I enjoyed it.  

And my grandmother would be proud.