A Good Sunday Morning Of Service

Today was a social action day at our synagogue.

It consisted of volunteering for various activities to help the homeless in Detroit.

The activity our family did, along with quite a number of other families, as it was a big production, was to make 600 bagged lunches for some of the homeless shelters to be delivered tomorrow.

This consisted of packing each paper sack with a juice box, pudding and animal crackers, a spoon, a napkin, and a sandwich.  Sandwiches were made by teams in the kitchen and were either egg, tuna or cheese.

I started with unpacking the animal crackers and then unboxing and separating the pudding cups.

We then setup an assembly line. After all, the synagogue is in the Detroit area, so you must have an assembly line! Each sack then had each item put in at each station where each item was dropped in the bag, the bag checked to make sure everything was in it, and the sacks were then lined up awaiting sandwiches.  This was pretty fast and efficient.

Since we had no union to slow us down, we jumped around to various tasks as needed.  I variously loaded pudding and spoons into the bags, packed sandwiches into bags, labelled each bag as to the sandwich inside it, packed the bags into their shipping containers and labelled them, kept count of how many tuna sandwich bag packs were made, and then helped in the kitchen making egg sandwiches.

Other teams made blankets, packed toiletry/overnight bags for kids at homeless shelters and many other useful activities.

All the kids participating were awesome in how they helped out enthusiastically and without complaint.  A very good bunch of kids ranging from the small kindergartners to tall teenagers all working to get the tasks done.

There was lots of good fellowship and it was a worthwhile way to spend a Sunday morning and early afternoon.

Afterwards, we went with a few of the families we know out to lunch and had a nice time with them and had some great food and conversation to end the afternoon on a very positive note.