Celebration of Hope

Last Saturday I did my second service experience. There is a Compassion and Justice ministry at my church and every year they lead an event call Celebration of Hope. In mid spring the entire church participated in this celebration by supporting women in third world countries through the fair trade shop that is set up in the main lobby, participating in the "Five Day Challenge," and packing food and seeds with Feed My Starving Children. The "Five Day Challenge" is where the church is challenged to eat like some one in a third world country would. This includes one cup of oatmeal and one cup beans and rice a day and only drinking coffee and water. In preparation for the challenge, the Compassion and Justice ministry is giving away samples of the amount of food to eat to every family and they had 24,000 packages of food to pack. They really needed help finishing, so a group of students from the high school ministry worked from 9:00am to 3:00pm to put a can of kidney beans, two small bags of rice, and a package of oatmeal in canvas bags. Twenty bags were put into each box and 60 boxes were put onto a pallet. We stood in an assembly line at a table and rotated positions every once in a while. Some times we had to move pallets of the supplies when we ran out, break boxes, and make new boxes. It seems kind of silly, but everyone started bleeding at one point, sometimes from breaking a box, or opening a case of beans with scissors. But the killer was the oatmeal packets, they were sharp and kept giving us paper cuts as we tried to slide them into the bags. Despite the blood, it was a very worthwhile experience. It was interesting to get an understanding for all of the work that actually goes on behind the scenes to make some of these events at my church run. In addition, one of the leaders of the ministry gave all of the students a fair trade bracelet. She told us that they will be given away to all the church goers during Celebration of Hope. She said that it was such a self-esteem boost to these women that some one wanted such a big order of something they had made.

This is a link to the Celebration of Hope website!