Community harvest-- perhaps this is an understandable name for a soup kitchen, but after working here for a few weeks I am wondering how exactly it applies. A harvest is an abundant gathering of the fruit of one's labor after months of planting and growing. A community harvest is the gathering of produce from an entire community's labor.
Is that really what goes on here? There definitely is a community. Danielle, Garyn, Carly, and I form the community of students that are here each week to set up tables and chairs, cook food for over one hundred people, serve, and then clean dishes, tables, and chairs. And each week our community serves a very specific commmunity. Yet the dinners do not seem to be a gathering of the produce of our community's hard work and labor. We buy food from Parkers Dining at the discounted price they give to service groups. The bread and food we send home with families each week are two day old donations from Weis. Where is the gathering together of produce and resources from our community? Sometimes it seems that as a community of students we do not have much to add to this harvest. We do not have money. We do not have food to bring. We do not know how to write grants to fund the kitchen. We gather a lot of community service hours for being here, but are we really needed? Do we really add anything?
But maybe we bring produce to this harvest in more subtle ways. Last week we served cookies for dessert baked by the Delta Gamma sorority. Each week a different group from campus comes to help serve (last week it was the ChiPhi fraternity, this week the Social Justice Residential College). Garyn has time and organizational skills which keeps our pantry stocked. He also is tall (6' 4" to be exact) and reaches all the pots none of us can get. Carly is well connected on campus which allows her to organize the volunteer groups that come to help serve each week. She also loves to stay behind the scenes and service unnoticed, so she makes the coffee, tea, lemonade and juice, and prepares the desserts. Danielle is a creative problem solver and loves talking to people, so she announces the start of dinner and comes up with ways to save money. I have enough energy (even if only from the latte I just chugged) to advertise the dinner to the community and to work with the kids from Bethesda to set up all the tables, chairs, napkins and silverware. In this way, Community Harvest really is a harvest of the produce of our lives as students. Community Harvest happens each week only because we come together with the fruits of our lives to create a harvest which we in turn use to serve others.
