By: Angela, Community Engagement Coordinator
To whoever may be reading this, we have just passed the one month point since starting this internship, which means this job is more than halfway over, which means summer break is drawing to a close, which means I have to return to school soon. Please send assistance immediately.
Jokes aside, the past 2 weeks since our last blogpost have flown after another bout of food bank runs, donation cleanups and two assigned novel readings. Still, there is a sense of longing for all the in-person community events that we’re unable to carry out due to COVID, especially looking at the past years’ schedules and memories of pre-COVID CEC interns, but also excitement from what we could accomplish during this time of change and hopefully pave a new path for engaging with our community in more unique ways. I’m glad that we have more opportunities to help out both Saint Jude and ET behind the scenes through cleaning out the donations at church, and I’m also pleased at how well this task lines up with one of the books I recently finished for the internship, Toxic Charity by Robert D. Lupton. But more on that later.
Although in-person opportunities are still few and far, they are a deeply treasured experience of this internship and have offered me a lot of food-for-thought as I take the bus home after another Wednesday at Saint Jude, or Thursdays after the Hubster’s parking lot meet up.
I am often thinking about the new things I’ve learned about the returning clients at the food bank, or about the logistics of the food distribution and stock like last Wednesday when the staff and interns went to spend over seven hundred dollars at NoFrills using the PC Optimum points. This was one of the most notable experiences so far from this internship and it was quite literally a food-for-thought moment as it really put into perspective the amount of money it takes to feed a community. Seven hundred doesn’t sound like a little amount, nor did the three massive shopping carts we hauled out of NoFrills, filled to the brim with boxes and cans. However, after my time at the food bank, I know in reality this haul may only cover a few weeks of food distributions. I think of the luxury I have to ponder over what to eat, whether I want a more healthy and filling meal or something to satisfy my cravings, rather than just picking and choosing from different cans of vegetable soup and beans. How many families can seven hundred dollars at NoFrills feed? How much nutrition can non-perishable foods and crackers deliver? These are only some surface level questions I pondered over this one-of-a-kind grocery run, not the type of questions I would ever encounter during our family’s shopping trips nor over our own meals.
I’m looking forward to this last month of community engagement and all the opportunities that Mattan and I still have to experience, and although I’m already disappointed to leave it behind, I’m also excited to see how we can go forth and apply all of these lessons and encounters into our regular lives after this summer.