A Saturday of Service
A couple weeks ago, I joined Vanderbilt’s Alpha Phi Omega which is a co-ed service fraternity on campus and this weekend, I got involved with my first service activity: working at Second Harvest Food Bank. I did not get the opportunity to do any real service my Freshman year so I was happy to volunteer some of my Saturday afternoon doing some simple work.
My group left at around 12:30pm and headed over to Second Harvest, a food bank in Nashville, TN. When we arrived, I was told we would be working inside a cold room sorting different kinds of meats. No one told me about this minor detail so I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Needless to say, it did not help the fact that I was already sick with the cold. Luckily, they gave us hoodies to wear so I was somewhat warm.
We worked until 4pm separating all the frozen meats into different categories, weighing the boxes to exactly 30 pounds and then transporting all the packaged meats into the freezer. The workload was not much and it was fairly easy work.The only bad part about this whole experience was when we had to take out the trash. Some of the packaged meat would be too old to be distributed and had to be thrown away. We had a shopping cart full of raw meat that we had to throw away in the dumpster. The dumpster was located way in the corner of the premise out in the back and the smell… it was awful. There are no words to describe that smell. It felt as if every good feeling and every happy memory was being sucked out of me. Harry Potter reference incase you didn’t pick up on it.
Overall, we actually got a lot of work done and I felt I had a very productive Saturday afternoon (that doesn’t happen often). My next volunteering activity is dressing up as an animal at the NASHVILLE ZOO and giving out candy to little kids. That, may be the single greatest night of my college career.