The guilt finally caught up .......

After a year of total indulgence "Living the Dream", I decided to check out some volunteer work.  There is so much you can do here but I found it hard to find something that appealed to me.  Finally I decided on the San Diego Food Bank.  A lot of Americans do volunteer work. It's a culture that really encourages it.  Lots of people use it to gain credits towards work or study and then petty criminals may have to do volunteer work as part of community service.  I've worked in a warehouse before so I felt somewhat prepared for the experience.  I arrived at the warehouse; got a quick explanation of what was needed; put the gloves on and started to go through the boxes of donated food.  We needed to check the expiration date, the condition of the package and follow a few basic guidelines as to what to keep and what to throw out. 

The first few boxes were fine, nicely packed with lots of decent food.  Then we came across a few half empty bottles, half eaten bars, opened jars etc.  This was a little disturbing but what was even more disturbing was someone finding a 12 pack of canned food thrown (by one of us volunteers) into the "unwanted skip".  He calmly asked why it was in the skip when to my horror someone said, "there was a dent on one of the cans and I couldn't find an expiry date".  He explained that the date would be on the individual tins, and if we could think to take the outer plastic off and save the remaining cans, he would greatly appreciate it.  This was followed by, "Oh, that's clever", by of the women standing beside me.  OMG!!!!!!!!

Anyway as we progressed through the boxes, we came across so much rubbish, I ended up having to ask if we were checking the right boxes.  It turns out that a lot of the boxes come from supermarkets and they refuse to separate the rubbish from any items that could actually be saved.  That was our job!  I have to be honest that a moment of sadness came over me as I thought of the poor people that were depending on us rooting through rubbish in order for them to be able to eat!

In any case, I've signed up for next week.  Should I however be unfortunate enough to come across any cockroaches, spiders or other creepy crawlies (there were numerous "reports" from others on my last shift), I shall either leg it out the door never to return, or shall be forcibly removed from the premises for the involuntary use of "choice" language!!