Mississippi Team Day 4

Day four was a lot of hard but rewarding work. We got up early and drove about 45 minutes to south San Francisco. Our goal was to reach out to people working along side us at the San Francisco Food Bank. We wanted the community to know that we as Christians are concerned with helping others. Many people in SF see Christians as uncaring and judgmental. We wanted to help break that stereotype by bringing a holistic gospel to them. One that meets needs while bringing the good news of Jesus. There were about 40 other volunteers working with and around us. We had the chance to engage in good conversation with several of them. The other volunteers were there for various reasons: community service hours for school, court appointed hours, filling up time while looking for a paying job, wanting to make a difference... Bringing up this topic was an easy inroad to learning about them. It also gave them the chance to ask us why we were there serving.

The food bank where we served distributes food to all the other food banks around SF. There are over 400 food banks around SF. This food bank is like a warehouse. They send out over a million pounds of food every day. It was an impressive operation to say the least. While there we had two jobs. The first was to repackage rice from 100 pound bags into 1 pound bags. The second was to go through crates of oranges and pick out rotten ones After that we repackaged the good ones into small boxes. Together with the other volunteers we were able to package over 11,000 pounds of rice! That rice averages out to about 33,000 meals! We were shocked to find out that we packaged 25,000 pounds of oranges! We learned that they along with all the produce there will find there way into someone's hand within a maximum of 72 hours! All along the way we made it a point to pray for the many people who would receive this food. Steve and I hope to bring our youth group out to do this again because we had such a fun time and it was such a great ministry opportunity!

Please pray for all the people who have recieved and will continue to recive the food we packaged. Please also pray for the many people we had conversation with like Rebecca, George, and Vladimir.

Packaging Oranges

Some of the team working  hard making rice bags.

After the food bank we headed off to do a little sight seeing. Our first stop was Lombard Street. The steepest street in America. While our dreams of driving down it were crushed (no cars with more that 8 seats are permitted) we did get to get out a look at it.

The van parked on Lombard Street while the team got out to take pictures. I admit was was nervous to get back in for fear of it tipping

Our next stop was China Town for some souvenir shopping. After driving around for a while we finally found a cheep spot that would accommodate our 15 passenger van. (We give God the glory for this spot because we were almost at the point of giving up!)

Picture of China Town

Molly and Will showing off some of their purchases.

We ended the night with a great cookout and hangout time put on by Brett and Allison. It was a true blessing for us to get to know everyone more and refresh after a long day.