Mother Hubbard's Cupboard....

NO MORE!!!

I work at my local food pantry once a month and have been for over 2 years. Actually, my Sunday school class volunteered to work together. It seems since the down turn of the economy our shelves have dwindled to less and less as the need has grown more and more. It saddens me to see such bare shelves and to tell some people "I am sorry but we are out of that item".

Today was Scout for Food day and you are probably familiar with it. If you aren't, it is where the Boy Scouts distribute a plastic grocery bag to every house in the area on a Saturday with a note asking people to donate items for the local food pantries. The following Saturday you are to place your filled bag on your front porch by 9 a.m. and the BS then go around and collect the filled bags and deliver them to the pantries. Before I left go to the pantry I volunteer at I filled my bag and then grabbed another bag and filled it, too.

We normally only have about 5 or 6 of us working on a given Saturday but today there were oodles of folks showing up to help out and thankfully so because this is a HUGE undertaking that requires many many people to get it done. The food is delivered to a building across from our pantry......items in the bags are tallied for a count and then taken to any number of tables to be sorted and boxed up. The boxes are then lugged over to the pantry and our "group" began to fill the shelves. We filled and filled and filled the shelves and it was so exciting to hear someone yell "no more room for chicken noodle soup! no more room for corn!"

We went from bare nothing shelves to shelves overflowing. It's my understanding the count was approximately 9,000 items collected. Oy, thatsa lotta food! Sadly though, it will probably go faster than normal because like I said before, the need it greater this year. So, if I may put a little bug in your ear.....if you have an abundance of canned/boxed goods or toiletries such as toilet paper, paper towels, shampoo, etc. then find out when your local food pantry is open and fill up one of the gazillion blue Wal Mart bags you might have stuffed in one of those handmade cloth bag holders and drop it off when you are out doing your errands. Better yet, let your neighbors know ahead of time and see if they will fill a bag, too. Trust me when I say "every bag counts and will be put to very good use for a family struggling to make ends meet".

It was a good day.