The First of Many Food Pantry Days

As promised - a post to tell you about how our Food Pantry went.
I was pleasantly surprised that about 75 volunteers showed up to help!

Even for our meeting that we had several day ahead of time that a representative from the Food bank had been amazed at how many people showed up just to learn about what to expect. I don't think he had ever seen that big of a crowd of people show up for the pre-meeting. 

Anyway on to Sabbath afternoon. At 12:45 is when we were to meet at the parking lot. Not in photo - to the right there is another section of parking - so we have plenty of parking for our guests. 

Down the middle were pallets of all sorts of food. Here is a list of food that we had - I may not have a complete list - I am going by what I remember: 

milk

chicken

potatoes

broccoli 

carrots 

cucumbers

honey dew

oranges 

grapefruit

grapes

limes

We were told the number of items per bag- so we began bagging up the produce - so as an example of what we did - we bagged up 4 large crowns of broccoli. It would depend of how large the family was as to if they got one or two bags. 

I was very happy to see that they had been able to get some donated grocery baskets- so that the families going through the line could put their stuff into the basket and then the items could easily be taken to their vehicles. 

I heard through the grapevine that about 200 people were feed by our food pantry. When you fill out paper work - you tell how many people are in your family and so I am thinking they were going by the total amount of people when figuring the number. 

It went surprisingly smooth. 

The Pastor in charge of this event had done his homework for sure. He had visited several other food pantries in the area to learn the best ways to do things. And it showed by how smoothly things went.

Oh and I got a tee shirt- I was so surprised!!  

Here is a view from above of our food pantry. 

We were blessed with fabulous weather on Sabbath. Thankfully the COLD weather didn't show up till Sunday. And as I was out running errands on Sunday - I was so very thankful for the temperatures that were in the upper 60's and lower 70's. It made for a very pleasant day! I pray that December's Food Pantry day will be a pleasant day as well for both the volunteers and our guests! :O)