Service Learning Experience

For my service learning, I attended to Feeding South Florida. This organization is responsible for providing food to insecure people in the counties of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe. Their work is based on banking food in big warehouses for future distribution. Being the biggest organization in these counties, statistics show, have rescued over 44 million pounds of food per year.

When I got to this place, at first, seemed abandoned and I even thought it was closed. When I entered I was welcome like they knew me always. Everyone I looked at had a smile on their faces, that’s where I realized I was going to enjoy this project. We had sort of a little meeting before the work, in order to understand where we were, what was going to be our mission that day and also some precaution advice.

Since I had never assisted to any kind of places like this one, I was a little skeptical, but when we go out of that room I met a group of people coming from FIU and I started to talk to them. They told me they went every month there in big groups to work and even had like a small organization at school were people could sign up to go. At that moment we were being guided to the actual warehouse and it was bigger than I expected. we made a big line where each one of us had to fill an item in a box that was passing around in a large roller strip. My mission was to fill canned beans. In the next 3 hours, I emptied almost 3 pallets of these! In the meantime, we were singing and talking to not think in tiredness. When we finished we went to have some rest, water and snacks and then to get our contracts signed.

This experience truly made me think of how there’s needed people right outside of our homes and must of us don’t even bother. Going there made me question myself not only the things I would do to help other but also to realize there are still people fighting for good causes like this one.

My own sense of responsibility has also got impacted. After this project, I changed some bad habits we have like throwing away food we buy and don’t like. Now, whenever I buy something I really make sure it won’t be wasted in vain.

I believe we all have to create awareness in regards of what is happening in our own communities and what consents to myself, I will encourage people to do more service projects like this to improve not only our community but also our civic values.