Souza - Volunteering

I have not lived an equal experience in my whole life!!  So today morning I spent some hours doing volunteer work at City Harvest’s Mobile Market.

City Harvest’s is the name of an organization that works as mobile Market to serve healthy food for people in New York, and according to the organization, these people who picks the food are facing hunger as consequence of having poor nutrition because of junk food  they consume. So they can’t afford buying healthy food; it is not cheap in New York.

Trying to help poor community, the service has begun in 1984, 30 years ago, to put good nutritious food on the table. Beyond engaging residents in healthy choices, the program provides Emergency food, Mobile Markets and Agency Capacity Expansion (ACE).

The place where I went was the Mobile Market in Brooklyn. People work there as volunteers packing and distributing fresh fruit and vegetables for these poor communities. So as soon as I arrived at the market, I could notice there were five tents with some people packing, weighing and distributing potatoes, cabbage, sweet potato, carrot and orange.

So I decided staying at the orange tent packing it. From the beginning I did not understand why there many plastic bags with some letters written on them,  A, B, C , and D, but some minutes later I was working. Well, the letters mean the amount of oranges I should put in each plastic bag. The letter corresponds to the family category; I think if the person does not have many other people living with her, she will take letter A plastic bag which contains nine to eleven oranges, this number of orange may correspond to six pounds. A large family will take letter C or D bag because these ones are the heaviest, ten to twelve pounds each. After, when I have packed oranges I helped my friend with carrots.

It was cold but I did not notice time goes by. I loved being at this place because it was an opportunity I had to help someone in the USA and learn English in a real life situation, that we call as teachers, real life class.

In Brazil I do volunteer work at a waste pickers’ cooperative work. I help them to organize the cooperative documents, participate with them in some meetings and appointments with the Mayor, environmental prosecutor and with the cooperative members. I do believe teachers can change the world. We have power of becoming students more solidarity, less selfish and think about others who are around them. I do believe we have to show them the way life is concerned to people's standard of living. while some have a large amount of money others starve. 

Some of my students are always invited to spend some time working with waste pickers and me, they are about eight. On the other hand, we can notice only few students like doing volunteer work; some of them do not like to spend their time helping others.

As I mentioned, this kind of work is very important for engaging students to social problems we live daily. They can realize that is spite of being at the same place the way they live is very different from others. Spending some hours dealing with poor people brings us some reflection about our life, and if one day they become a politician, they can take care of poor people or , even, respect them as a human being.