Just Another Day

Today, our mandatory afternoon activity was volunteering. To be honest, it’s kind of nice (coming from the lazy point of you) to be forced to do something good for others. We were given three options. The first was to go to an animal shelter to walk dogs. Apparently the dogs at this shelter are only allowed out of their cages if someone walks them. Sad, but not a dog person. The second option was to go to a children’s hospital and play with kids. This option was only for higher level Hebrew speakers. As a result, they came into my class (since I’m in the highest level) and tried to convince the entire class to come. I do generally like to work with kids, but I don’t like hospitals, and for some reason, I just wasn’t feeling genki (Japanese for peppy). To volunteer with kids, you have to be willing to be upbeat the entire time. While just about the whole rest of my class went, I opted for the third option. So what did I do?

The third option was to work with an organization called Leket (http://www.leket.org/english/). What this organization does is they provide food for the needy. They work with food companies and collect excess food, in other words, food that will expire in too near the future to sell to a store. They also work with farmers. We went to a plot of land that a lawyer owns with the specific person of growing all the food for charity. His biggest expense is to pick the fruit. So we went to pick. And we picked beets.

I actually thought it would be a lot harder to pick a beet than it was. They come out of the ground relatively easily. The hard part is then to rip off the leaves. The bigger the beet, the harder it is to get all of the leaves off in one go. This is also how you very quickly turn your hand (and clothing) purple. We had gloves, although, it was easily 80 degrees. When I took off the plastic gloves to get water, my hands were dripping with sweat. I tried to pull out a few beets with bare hands. It took two in order to turn my hands purple. With the sun beating down on us, it was hard work, but it quickly started to cool, and the going got easier.

At the end of the day, the 30 or so of us had picked 2.5 tons of beets to be given to the needy the following day. I’ve volunteered at random places for a day or two along the way, but for some reason this was different. Working with your hands to make a direct impact, seeing the crates filled with beets that we pick that would go to families. It really felt like we made at least a bit of a difference. And it was a pretty awesome experience. Maybe I’ll go back and pick some oranges.