This week, I participated in a service trip to God’s Love We Deliver in Lower Manhattan.
The experience was life changing to say the least.
You might be asking “What exactly is God’s Love?”
What God’s Love actually does is provide nutritious and healthy meals to people who are sick with various diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, etc. All of these people are unfortunately too sick to cook or buy groceries for themselves, so God’s Love delivers food right to their doors.
There are 3 essential parts to the process of delivering food to someone. The first is cooking, preparing and packaging the food. The second is putting together the meal orders for the person and packing all of the orders for a specific route. The third is delivering the meals to the people in need.
Throughout the 21 hours of volunteering I did this week, I was able to participate in all three parts of the process. Each part of the process was a different but equally rewarding experience.
My group and I participated in the first step on both of our days in the kitchen (2 days total). Our first job was crunching up catfish so that it could be made into fishcakes. I genuinely wanted to throw up doing it, and we did it for probably 2 hours. Although crunching up fish wasn’t a pretty task, I was able to talk to two of the other girls in my group and learn a lot about them.
We also poured and packaged soup on both of our kitchen days which turned out to be very interesting. By the end of the 3 hours of soup pouring, we made 2,368 bowls of soup. Despite blisters on our hands and our palms being bruised, we grew to love the soup pouring and had so many laughs about it.
I got to participate in the second part of the process on my last day in the kitchen. This involved putting every clients individual order into bags and then into crates to be set out on a delivery route. Let me tell you, this is hard work. There was 4 of us at a table: on person putting soups in the bag, I was putting in the entrees, another woman was putting in desserts and breakfasts, and the last man was putting in bread and putting the completed bags into the crates.
I never realized how much work this process was, but all 4 of us were running around, grabbing different foods each specific client wanted. We did about 4 routes with over 300 bags of meals completed in just under 3 hours.
This came full circle when we all did van deliveries (part 3) on Wednesday of this week. Each of us split up and went to different places with our drivers. Personally, I went to Queens with my driver and delivered mostly to houses. Each of us had a different experience because some delivered to apartments while others, like me, delivered to mostly houses. Everyone in my group went to a different place: Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Lower Manhattan.
I met a lot of different people throughout my 3 days of volunteering at God’s Love and that is what I plan on talking about in my next post!
Boston & Beyond 