Giving Back
Students experience the joy of volunteering during the FIUTS Day of Service.
Guest post by FIUTS facilitator Jiaqi (Kyki) Li
FIUTS student volunteers at Food Lifeline
On November 22, I attended the FIUTS Fall Day of Service at Food Lifeline with three facilitators (Stephanie Lam, Mandy Niu, and Miko Qi) and seven participants. It was just the right time to do community service since one of the most important American cultural holidays - Thanksgiving - was coming in a week.
In the name of a day of service, we met outside of the Burke Museum around 11:30 am. The weather was cold since it was late November but people were fully prepared—both with layers and layers of clothes and an excited warm heart. Some of us had the experience of doing community service before while to others it was the first time. But all of us were very excited.
We took a 72 bus for roughly 40 minutes up to the northern part of Seattle and there is the Food Lifeline. For someone like me who is from a fast and busy city, the Food lifeline looks like a lovely white county house located in a quiet neighborhood, but as we went in, it actually is like a huge warehouse! Boxes and boxes of food located on stories and stories of shelves. All the food was surplus donated by the food industry. When the food, which might have otherwise gone to waste, came to the Food Lifeline, it was going to be transformed and redirected to hungry people and families who would not be able to afford enough food in Seattle. To all of us volunteers, it was amazing to take part in such a creative and beneficial service.
There were not only FIUTS volunteers but also many local families volunteering at Food Lifeline that day. People came in with friends and their kids. It was good to see how the spirit of Thanksgiving—giving back to the society—was integrated in local American families’ daily life.
After a brief introduction of our duty that day by the Food Lifeline staff, each of us took a pair of hand gloves, an apron and a hair cap. All of a sudden we became like the laborers working along the assembly line. It turned out that there was a real assembly line.
Our work was divided into several categories, 2-3 people chopping the iced yellow waxed beans and shoving them into big boxes, some people tagging the bags and reassembling the beans into small bags weighing roughly 2 pounds, 1 person tying the bags up and putting them on the running assembly line and finally others grouping 8 bags into a big cardboard box. These sounds like boring work but it was actually not! The Food Lifeline did not specifically teach us everything so that the team working together figured out how to chop the beans with the least casualty, how to use the measure, and how to do everything fast and efficiently! By collaborating with one another, we all learnt some new skills and shared our appreciations of food and the hard work of those people who brought food to our dinner table.
In the end, we helped “repack 4248 pounds of frozen yellow wax beans in three hours, providing 3540 meals for the hungry people of western Washington.” It was fascinating to see how much work we did in just three hours and even better to see how many meals our work provided for the people in need.
On our way back, many of our participants expressed their happiness gained in making new friends while doing service, and their appreciation to FIUTS for providing such opportunity. There are no better ways to get the essence of American Thanksgiving spirit then participate in a real giving back activity!
Give back to FIUTS this Giving Tuesday (December 2) to help us offer programs like the Day of Service for students from around the world!