The idea to volunteer at the food bank, I told my coworkers, came to me in a dream: I was standing on the bed of a pickup throwing granola bars at children with swollen bellies. (I had to clarify that their bellies were swollen because they were hungry.) It was important that Brad and Brock knew I had a good reason for skipping our Friday afternoon rendezvous in the break room, during which we discussed colleagues who weren’t in the break room. But I made sure to keep it under wraps until lunch on Thursday, thereby ensuring that I alone would be the one who’d get to say “My weekend was so, so rewarding” at least half a dozen times on Monday.
I had really gotten the idea eight days earlier, at breakfast, while I was eating food. I thought about all the people who didn’t have food to eat, and the fact that my friend Rick had told me the night before that the whole swollen belly thing was because of hunger.
And these hungry people couldn’t just be in other countries, I thought – some of them must live near me. I Googled “hungry people living near me” and, after a few seconds of focused scrolling, found out that the food bank was also open on non-Thanksgiving and -Christmas days.
I emailed Jen, the food bank’s volunteer coordinator, to let her know that I, an employee of a Major Technology Company, would gladly sacrifice an afternoon of paid email-checking to feed the hungry. Despite her terse response that they were “all set” with volunteers for the “next couple days,” I accepted her invitation to appear at the warehouse from 1-4 p.m. the following Friday.
Over the next week, I spent minutes enlightening my friends and neighbors about hunger, the reality for, I think, a good number of people. My most impactful encounter was on Kayla Thompson’s Facebook page, in full view of up to 126 mutual friends. For her twenty-sixth birthday, she was raising money for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. As I mentioned previously, I work for a Major Technology Company, so reading her six lengthy sentences about what Planned Parenthood meant to her was out of the question.
Instead, I took a few seconds to bring things into perspective for her. “Kayla, this is so generous of you, but I urge you to remember that a lot of people can’t even go to Planned Parenthood because they are hungry.” This was three days ago, and I look forward to speaking with her once she’s had time to consider my input.
On Friday morning, I set out clothes that would allow others to identify me as a Benevolent Liberal White Male: my college roommate Kipp’s “Public Radio Nerd” T-shirt; a flannel button-down that I would wear in place of an actual jacket; dark, un-ironed khaki pants; my other roommate Cal’s “I’m With Her” baseball cap; and Chacos.
The work itself was brutal. The sweet potatoes were so dirty and lopsided that I spent the first ten minutes of my shift scooping them out of the crate and into the garbage bin. Jen told me that the supermarket had donated them precisely because they weren’t “display ready,” which prompted me to contemplate society’s misaligned priorities until Jen asked me why I had been in the break area for half an hour.
I had embarked on this journey to end hunger alone; my partners in sorting and bagging were ten strangers. Nine of them were from a church group. The tenth stranger – Lena – was chipping away at her court-ordered twenty-six hours of community service for a reckless driving charge. I nodded with a great deal of empathy as Lena opened up to me, and I told her about my purely intrinsic motivation to donate my time, without God or the D.A. breathing down my neck. I think we made a real connection, even though she’s taking her time responding to my texts.
At the end of our shift, Jen told us that we had packed enough produce for 1,480 meals (which, it turns out, is not equal to the number of hungry people who live near me). Still, I was proud of my cohort, even though at least nine of them had showed up for selfish reasons. As the other volunteers rushed to the parking lot, I took a “helpie” in front of the food bank sign, the most deformed sweet potato I could find balanced on my right shoulder, to publicly announce that the experience had humbled and changed me.