Service Learning Log 2- Devyn Parnes

On Tuesday I went to the Denver Rescue Mission to help prepare a meal. When I arrived, I checked in at the front desk and then went downstairs into the basement where the food is prepared. When I walked down the stairs, I was immediately put to work. I was asked to put on an apron, the “official uniform of Denver Rescue Mission volunteers,” and then I started sorting bread products. The Denver Rescue Mission gets bread deliveries every day and they have storage racks to separate the varying types of products. At a certain point, grocery stores and restaurants take products off the shelf as they approach their expiration date, but as long as it is not moldy, the rescue mission uses it. When I walked to the bread corner, there were bags and bags of bread. There was some generic white, some generic wheat, english muffins, bagels, baguettes, buns and a few other types of bread products. I was to shelve the products according to type and throw away anything that is moldy, open or not pre-sliced. The rescue mission throws away any bread that is not pre-sliced because it is too labor-intensive to try to cut all the bread while they are trying to prepare a meal.
After I put all the bread products away, I took hot dog buns off the shelf, unwrapped them and checked for mold or disfiguration. On average, the Denver Rescue Mission feeds upwards of 300 people each meal, so I had to unwrap all of the hotdog buns that they had. It took about 15 minutes to unwrap and sort through all the buns and then I started on “spork rolling.” There were already two other volunteers working on rolling sporks, so I joined them. Each patron gets a napkin and a spork when they come to eat, but it is not sanitary to have each patron reaching into a bucket of sporks. To make sure that everything is sanitary, each spork has to be individually wrapped in a napkin. I was quickly taught how to make a “spork burrito.” I unfolded each napkin, set the spork on the diagonal, folded in the sides of the napkin and then rolled them up. As monotonous as making spork burritos was, I was told that it saves an employee over three hours if they have multiple volunteers start producing in mass quantities. I rolled sporks for the rest of my time at the Denver Rescue Mission.
Once again, I witnessed all the hours of monotonous work that it takes to prepare for a large volunteer event. I have worked at soup kitchens before, but in my town we were usually cooking for about 40 people, not 300. The rescue mission produces three meals a day, everyday, so there is constantly work to be done. They have to stock the shelves, prepare the food, cook the food, clean up after, dispose of food that goes rancid, and then do it all over again, multiple times per day.
I think this helped further enrich my understanding of public good. Volunteerism is sometimes, and in fact I would argue a majority of the time, work that does not directly affect the community you are trying to benefit. While stocking shelves and rolling sporks are clearly important tasks in order for everything to be prepared for the patrons, I did not have a single interaction with the clients I was there to benefit. Through both of my service-learning activities I experienced this same phenomena. It has given me a really good perception as to how much work occurs behind the scenes of every volunteer activity. There are full-time coordinating positions in many volunteer programs because there are just so many small tasks to be delegated. I think that my service learning has given me a greater appreciation of just how much time, money, effort, and coordination goes into helping others. The people behind the scenes are not always the most recognized, but they are clearly integral to the final result.
Before these projects, it was harder to put in perspective just how much work goes into helping others. I think that one of the most important reasons that this needs to be addressed is so people get credit where credit is due. While most people like volunteering because they want to help others, it has been proven that many do it for some self-centered reasons as well. If we do not recognize and commend everyone for all the hours of boring work they did behind the scenes, then chances are, in the future we will have less people willing to do this kind of work. The recognition of these behind the scenes laborers is a necessity in many ways, so the more people that have experience working with them, the more people that will appreciate the work that they are doing.