Mission Trip Work at the Central PA Food Bank

Unlike last year, when I spent the week on the mission trip out up in the mountains surrounded by agricultural opportunities, this year I was placed in a very urban city; Harrisburg PA. Yet I still found my way to it anyways. Of the many projects, one that I enjoyed working on was the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. Two of the days I got to work sorting food. The first was canned or box goods that were being put into small boxes that would be handed to families directly. My friends and I enjoyed this as we knew our efforts were directly affecting the people in the area.

  

   The second day we were there, we walked into the massive warehouse and were faced with 6 pallet-sized boxes of vegetables. Pounds and pounds of cucumbers, peppers, eggplants,squash, and zucchini. I have never seen so many vegetable in my life. Anyways, my job that day was to take those vegetables and sort them into new, also very large containers for processing at the warehouse. As you can imagine this process took a very long time and my group and I had the pleasure of getting to talking with some of the regular volunteers. Through these conversations we learned that they serve people as far as Maine and New York. nearly 44 million pounds of food went out of this small building. A lot of the time the Central Pennsylvania  Food Bank will take food produce that surrounding farms can not sell and package it for food-banks and soup kitchens. I found this interesting because it allows for people in need to actually get fresh, locally grown produce. Something that many of them have to go with out due to price. 

Some of the other days of the trip we got to work at a school in a greenhouse that was being implemented as an after school program. The program was a project created by a member of the Americorp, who was working in the city, to expose the children of the inner city to agriculture. It was a great time repairing and cleaning out their green house.