February Update

Volunteering

Monthly service hours: 7 hours, 5 minutes                                                                                                          Cumulative service hours this semester: 7 hours, 5 minutes

I went to Second Harvest three times over break and got to catch up on my service hours. All three times I was there, we were just putting sweet potatoes into bags. Per the volunteer coordinator, Emily, the sweet potatoes had been donated from Washington Parish, LA, and they are a really popular donation because of their high nutritional content.

I never knew there were so many different kinds of sweet potatoes--the ones we were sorting through came in such a wide variety of shapes and sizes. I attached a picture of one of the filled-up bins from one of the shifts. In the picture, you can see that these sweet potatoes were rather large and round, but we had also been packing some smaller, bizarrely shaped sweet potatoes. I should have taken more pictures for comparison, ha!

The warehouse is currently under construction, so the regular repacking room we are normally in is closed. There is a makeshift repack area in a different part of the warehouse, but we had been in the 55-degree cooler all week. Given how cold and windy it was this past week, that might sound like a nightmare. But believe it or not, it actually felt warmer and better to be in the cooler because the warehouse isn't climate-controlled.

At the shift today, Emily told us we packed 2,670 pounds of sweet potatoes. Since I went three times, I am imagining I helped pack something like over 8,000 pounds throughout the week.