Basic Needs
As of yesterday, we successfully completed our first day at the wonderful organization here in Austin, called Caritas. We arrived shortly after lunch, and as soon as we got there, our volunteer coordinator, Molly Stipe, had us right to work. The first thing that we started with was bagging rice. We went to the food pantry and the friendly workers gave us about 150 pounds of rice and beans. We began packaging the goods, but when thing did not go as planned, we moved on to a less messy project. We started packaging diapers for the clients at Caritas who have small children. We all went down to the pantry to fetch some diapers and came up with about 400 diapers of all different size. The way they had to be packaged was as follows: we had to put 8 diapers of all one size in a Ziploc bag, then put the size of the diaper on the outside of the bag. Once we had enough bags of diapers of the same size, we had to put them all in a box. We labeled the box with the size and sent the box back down to the pantry. At one point, we realized that we were out of boxes, so Monica and I, went down back down to the pantry to get some more. When we got there, we offered to pack more diapers if she had more for us to work on. So when we came back up, Monica and I came back, yes with more boxes, but also like 600 more diapers. Our entire D-Term group was working like a well-oiled machine when it came to packaging about 1,000 diapers. We got it done so quickly and Molly was extremely impressed. She said that we oozed enthusiasm and thatshe was astonished by not only how fast we completed our tasks, but with how much effort and energy went into completing them the way we did. Overall, I think the experience my entire D-Term group shared at Caritas was a very positive one.