Day 4: Food Bank

Again, today was awesome! :) We got up this morning and ate, OF COURSE, and headed off to the Capital Area Food Bank. As was mentioned last night, we were under the impression that we were packing food boxes like the community christmas chest. When we got there we were all SHOCKED at how big of an operation this really was!!


As soon as we arrived, we headed straight to the volunteer department to get instructions. In this part of the warehouse there were huge metal, open-top, boxes full of food. The food was all divided up- for example: canned meats, canned soups, condiments, baby food, etc. Our first task was to box these things up. The girls boxed and the boys carried the HEAVY boxes over to the pallets so they could be loaded into the 'unvolunteer' side of the warehouse. We got done so quick the volunteer coordinator began to panic because she didn't think she had enough for us to do!

After we cleaned all the metal crates out, the coordinator had us sort some donated food back into the metal crates. Which, again, took us no time! By this point it was time for lunch!!! :) Thankfully, the room we ate lunch in had air conditioning!!!! That warehouse was awful stifling!!

After lunch, the coordinator, Oye, explained to us their program that is identical to backpack buddies- only the food is put into Wal-Mart sacks. She told us that since it is the summer not as many kids get them as do during the school year, which makes sense. The figure, though, blew our minds: EACH WEEKEND they deliver 2,100 food bags to school-age CHILDREN! Can you even fathom what 2,100 KIDS looks like? Our job for this project was to get the assembly line set up and ready to go for the TEAMeffort Sevierville group that will get to go there tomorrow. Once again the boys got to do the labor intensive work. Oye had them moving pallets and unloading all of the boxed food into more metal crates. Once they finished this they had to assemble boxes for the sacks to be loaded into for delivery. The girls had to take grocery sacks and double them up...2,100 of them! Sounds easy....try it some time. ;)


This may all sound boring- but we made it all kinds of FUN! Knowing that we were helping so many people who didn't have access to food made it all worth it. It's kind of like Moses leading the people to the Promised Land....he did 40 years of work and never got into the Promised Land. We worked hard yet we'll never truly understand/comprehend the magnitude of an impact we made! 


Because of the hard and efficient work everyone did today, Chris took us out and treated us to Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robbins! :) Yummmmm. Supper was really good tonight, too. We had a huge cookout and ate in the parking lot with all of the other churches here. Good times. Worship was phenomenal and, like always, our devo. time was SUPER!!! :) God's moving- No doubt about it! :)