food drive

My fifth grade sunday school class wanted to do a food drive for their project this month. This is the first time they've volunteered an idea for the monthly missions-y type project. The ideas started enthusiastically pouring in. Go around the neighborhood asking for food!! Gather the food!! Stack the food INTO A GIANT PYRAMID!! What kind of PYRAMID! The pyramid should be made this way!! We need to ask for only certain types of canned food that are the right size! Or else the pyramid won't stand up right!! Let's fixate on this pyramid thing for two whole weeks!! What? We're gathering food for a food bank? You mean GIANT PYRAMID!

Anyway, we enthusiastically went around the neighborhoods by the church asking for donations of canned food/packaged stuff for the local food bank. I was paired up with one of the fifth grade girls, who is only a few inches shorter than me. The first five houses we went to we were met with enthusiastic "No!!" to donating food to the food bank. The next two houses were cute old people who first asked the fifth grader "and what school do you go to?" and she replied "___ Elementary" and then they turned to me and asked, "And you must go to ______ High School! Here let me tell you a story about that school...." or "Have you had Mr. So and So this year as your teacher?" and I'm like uhhh. I'm with ____ Church and uhh.... I'm uh... not.... in.... high.... ok thanks for the food bye k bye.

And repeat. At every other house. For the next ten houses.

Anyway, we met a few nice people who gave us one food item apiece. We hit a lot of houses to get one food item per house. A Top Ramen. A Campbell's soup. I was happy to be getting anything at this point, but it kind of annoyed me that we could see their GIANT pantry in their GIANT house that had like 1,000 food items and they hand us over a "Eggplant stuffed with rice in vinegar" can. Trying not to judge but... yah. Totally judging right then.

We also met a LOTTTTT of grumpy people. Angry senior citizen man who wants me to know "I'll give you a can, I'll make you FEEL how it is to carry canned food, for what you did to me, making me find canned food. You know THOSE people will never stop getting hungry. It's only going to get worse. There'll only be MORE. and then you'll have to carry MORE food. I hope this is too heavy for you to CARRY because of what you're doing to me." Then he dramatically shoved a 1 1/2 lbs can of fruit into my box. SO dramatic. Oh, it was so heavy, wahhh, I felt the burden of all the inconvenience I caused him.

Anyway, the fifth graders were pretty much ignorant of the general grumpiness and mostly saw "Nice Suburban People Giving Us Giant Cans for our GIANT PYRAMID OF GLORY!" I was ready to quit at 100 food items but the girl dragged me around another four blocks, very long blocks uphill. So I could tell she was loooving it. I liked it too, really, and found the rather surprise/disgust/annoyance we caused people entertaining enough.

When all the pairs came back we were successful in getting food, some 500 lbs of food or something, so there WERE people out there giving, maybe just not to me and my partner. In the end, though, it really made me a little sad as I reflected back on my day. I've done neighborhood food drives before in the county I used to live in, which was all low-income housing areas or dirt poor farmers. In junior high and high school we did a drive every year - the youth leaders would drive us around while we stopped by each place to ask for food. I do not remember any house turning us away, in fact each house would give multiple food items. And they smiled and said "thank you" to us and even told us stories of how the one or two times they needed the food bank it made all the difference, and helped them feed their children or what not. I knew those older couples on the farms did not have much of anything, what they canned was what got them through the winter - but they still shared.

Hmm.