Day Three—Caroline

Today we woke up bright and early to serve at Father Joe’s Village, which serves the homeless population of San Diego. They have a lot of services, including serving three meals a day to anyone who needs it, a shelter for families, permanent low-income housing, and much more. Our job was to serve meals to people in two different places: half of us worked in a kitchen serving food for families, and the other half worked in a kitchen serving food for any individual who wanted or needed it. I was working in the kitchen for the individuals, and I had two different jobs: for a while, I was scooping potatoes and gravy onto meal trays, but for a bit I was helping serve people with disabilities and people with pets who could not get into line as easily. We would talk to them, and get them trays of food and water. We worked from 10:45 - 12:30, when the cafeteria closed, and during that time we served about 685 people. After that, we ate lunch, and then took a 2.5 mile hike to a waterfall, which was beautiful! We splashed in the waterfall for a while and cooled off before hiking back the way we came. I had many wonderful conversations with a lot of the people on the trip, including Saleah and Nathaniel. We had a nice dinner afterwards, and then finished the day with compline. This day was rather amazing, both in terms of service and bonding time, but the service was especially amazing. Although I wasn’t always directly interacting with the people eating, I had some good interactions with people. One thing that makes feeding people especially fulfilling is that it impacts so many people directly, and we get to see all the people we are feeding. In many other types of service, we never really see the impacts of our service, but with feeding people, you see every person you help feed, and you can see the impact in all of the people’s lives. Sent from my iPhone