Impact of event is immeasurable

I wasn’t sure why I raised my hand.

Don’t we learn at an early age to be cautious about volunteering?

But when the Feed My Starving Children woman in the red hair net asked who wanted to work on the “warehouse” part of the mobile food pack last Saturday, my hand shot up.

Maybe it’s because she asked for volunteers who were comfortable lifting boxes that weighed 35 pounds repeatedly and I wanted to show that I could keep up with the young guys.

At any rate, I had more than a few decades on the others in our group of 13 who left the bleachers and headed for our workstation.

“There’s no age limit, is there?” I asked as we moved toward the south end of the auxiliary gym at Jay County High School.

Another trained person in a red hair net started to sort us out into individual duties, and again I raised my hand.

Sure, I said, I would scoop rice. After all, I thought, I’ve been scooping birdseed into our backyard feeders for as long as I can remember. Rice couldn’t be that much different from millet or sunflower seed or whatever the heck else is in the bag of birdseed.

So my new best friend Drew and I were sent over to the rice, both of us kind of wondering what we had gotten ourselves into.

On pallets, there were two large — and I do mean large — bags of rice. Each one was about four feet by four feet by four feet. I looked on the label but couldn’t find any indication of the weight. All that Drew and I knew was that it was more rice than we’d ever seen in one place at the same time.

The red hair net lady returned and shot out our instructions in rapid fire. Drew seemed to understand immediately. But as the old guy, carrying about 50 years more than Drew, I had to ask her to repeat the instructions again. And more slowly this time.

Following earlier instructions, I alerted the red hair net person that I had a scrape on my left thumb. She gave me a Band-Aid, then it was time to clean up with hand sanitizer and put on the funkiest blue plastic gloves I’d ever seen.

Beside our giant bag of rice, there was a folding table with seven plastic tubs, each of them lined with a plastic bag. Our job, Drew and I learned, was to keep those tubs filled up to about two-thirds level so that runners could take them to the various meal pack sites around the gym. If we filled them to the top, they were too heavy; and the last thing anyone wanted was spilled rice, wasted food that should have gone into the tummy of a hungry kid.

So, we scooped. And scooped. And scooped.

Drew and I intuitively worked out a system for moving the tubs around on the table so that the full ones were easily accessible and the ones that needed filling were easily within reach of both of us.

We didn’t talk much; we were working. But we did cover some essentials.

Yeah, I’m the guy from the newspaper; yeah, Drew’s in the percussion section for the band.

But most of the conversation was non-verbal, body language, occasional rolling of eyes when things got crazy.

But scoop after scoop, that bag was emptied. And when it was, volunteer Jack Houck showed up to help us pour the last of bag one into bag two and haul the pallet away. Then we scooped some more.

Just for the record, we didn’t empty the second bag. In fact, when the pack ended, tubs were brought back to us, so we had to reverse the process and dump them back into the bag.

If I had to guess, I’d say we scooped out roughly 1.8 giant bags of rice.

But, ultimately, that’s not how you measure things like this.

That’s the way I figure it, and I’m pretty sure Drew would say the same.