Service & Stats - Brian

Hello Brian Weeks here, I have had an amazing trip in San Diego so far. In my work group there is Scott, Emma, Chloe, Phil, Zane and I. Monday at our first site we worked at a park called Flinn Springs where our job was to pick up trash from a wedding that had happened over the weekend. They started off by telling us it’s very dirty, but we were lucky if we filled two trash bags. It was one of the cleanest parks I have ever seen. Today we went back to the park and it was much more laid back because it was so hot and they didn’t want to over work us. What we did today is empty a bunch of buckets full of dirt so they could use the buckets for plants and the dirt they used for mulch. After that they handed us rakes and we raked out leaves around new trees so they could water them better. On the way to the park we stopped at 7/11 to see if we could get some free Slurpee’s and we found out that we were two hours early and it didn’t start till eleven but the manager behind the counter was very nice and let us get them for free anyways. At our second site we went to a place called the triple A which stands for Alliance for African Assistance which is a thrift shop to the public and it helps refuges when they come over they find them an apartment for cheap and they furnish them with everything you could think of then when they get here. A social worker brings them in and they can get clothes and toys for their kids. And there I was able to work in the back where the donations come in and I got to sort through them and price them then someone would take a cart through the store and put them away. They have one full time worker and one driver the rest of the people that work there are volunteers that they train and it allows them to gain experience working with money and just working in a store in general. The last site we do is every other day in the morning it’s called Feeding San Diego. It’s basically a food bank but they do more to meet the needs of the people in the community. They work with local library’s that kids can go and get there food from since the schools are closed for the summer and it helps the parents of the kids out a lot because most of them are working 2-3 jobs and don’t have time to make it to a food bank. We started out by sorting plums and they are very precise with their food that goes out they had scales there that we would weigh the plums. After we did that my job was to wash buckets that they put their food in because they don’t know what has been in it and they don’t know what people have allergies. When we were about to leave we found out that they work with all 260 Starbucks in the San Diego area to pick up the food they don’t use and would throw out. A truck goes to the stores at 3am to get the food and they try their best to have that food in a kids hands that morning for breakfast or lunch. I have never seen a organization work so hard and do their best to work with the community. They try not only to feed as many people as they can but feed them healthy food to gets them the nutrients they need. They told us a stat which is heart breaking and it was 1 in 8 people in San Diego don’t know where their next meal is coming from and 1 in 6 kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Why is it that the people that can eat when they want and have steady jobs take everything for granted we as Americans waste 40 percent of the food we have. And not all of it is food we just didn’t eat all of some might be out of your fridge or some of it might not have even left the store because they don’t think it’s good enough to sell or eat. I’ve heard people complaining about the water here and even buying their own jugs from the store because they don’t like the way it tastes here but they don’t realize how lucky they are to have fresh clean water that they don’t have to worry about being sick by. I mean sure the water doesn’t taste great but water is water be happy that your able to get it when every you want. Thanks for reading this hope you enjoyed.