Will Volunteer for Mangoes
Headphones in, music blasting, I walked four blocks in this beautiful weather to go volunteer at a food pantry, which I mentioned in my latest blog. Turns out -- I ended up at the wrong location which makes no sense considering I knew the pantry was not even a block from the house. One lesson I learned at the start of today: follow your first mind instead of Google. Surprisingly undeterred, considering last night I thought about not going at all, I walked the four blocks back and finally entered an alley down into the basement of a large apartment building right into the pantry.
It felt like a mini warehouse, stacked to the short ceiling with boxes of fresh produce, carts filled with watermelon and honeydew melons. Everyone was preoccupied, but kind upon introduction. After I put my bag away I was thrown right into a task of putting six apples into a white plastic bag with one mango and six oranges. One thing I've loved about living in New York is it doesn't matter which fruit stand I go to, all the fruit is so fresh, and it's true for the pantry as well. I surely was eyeing those mangoes the entire time. I worked alongside two women volunteering together, one more talkative than the other, and we filled several boxes with bags of fruits, talking and laughing in the meanwhile.
We finished that task in record time and were led to another room to the next task. (Can I prove it was record time? Of course not.) There we had to undo the bags filled with six yogurts and one cream cheese with an additional tub of butter and six more yogurts. I don't like to half ass when it comes to work and the same is true for volunteering so I was undoing the knots on those bags like I had been doing it for years with no issue. My nails hurt, my finger tips hurt, and I was exhausted by the end but it felt so good to accomplish a lot in such a short amount of time. One of the other volunteers brought up the importance of trying new things in life, so of course, I had to try one of the yogurts we had been filling the bags with. Me and the girls celebrated finishing our work for the day with a bottle of vanilla keifer yogurt, which was cold and delicious, I'm considering trying the other flavors.
Who knew my years of stock experience would really come in handy one day? I left with a bag filled with three mangoes, kale, a zucchini, a box of cherry tomatoes and a few heads of broccoli, excited to return bright an early the next morning.
