Of Hairnets and Hotels

I didn't even bother trying to make my clothing match yesterday morning (Thursday). It was service learning day, and I was a part of the group that was going to work with food. That's all I knew. The organization was called Food and Friends, and I knew that they made food, packaged the food, and delivered the food. And apparently they were friendly.

And it reminded me of Finding Nemo: "Fish are friends, not food."

But the day turned out to be much more. Despite the fact that I chose to match purple with brown, I was able to help package up food for over 500 people who live with life-threatening diseases so they could have a meal.

About 10 of us ventured out from our apartments at 8:15 a.m. Thursday morning and headed to the outskirts of DC to the Food and Friends campus. The first thing they gave us were name tags and hairnets.

Yes. Imagine my hair...in a hairnet. It's quite the visual image.

I was put in the "expediting" section, which basically included reading the labels on the paper grocery bags and putting the correct food in. We were packing bags that would go out to homes on Fridays. We were putting one entrée and one "cold bag" (an assortment of other foods) in each grocery bag, but some people have special diets because of their illnesses, so they got special entrées or cold bags. That was what the label told us.

I was working with one other girl from our team, and we helped fill grocery bags until about 11:30 a.m., at which point we finished all of the bags and started labeling bags for Saturday. We then met up with the rest of our team for a short lunch break at the TacoBell/KFC across the street.

We returned to Food and Friends just after 1 p.m., and they put us into an assembly line, putting together cold bags for Saturday. Each person was in charge of putting a certain item in. Half the team did regular bags, and the other half (which I was in) did special diet bags. It was really fun getting to work together as a whole team and joking around.

We finished around 3 p.m. and headed back to our apartments, because ASP had class at 4 p.m. So I just messed around for most of the rest of the afternoon, working on different projects. Then we had our very first "family dinner" at 6 p.m.

Family dinner is with both groups together, and it's basically a night where this wonderful woman makes us all a fantastic dinner and we all eat together. This week, she made chili and salad. It was delicious. For dessert we had cheesecake and Ghiradelli dark chocolate!!! She knows how to please =)

Karin and I went down to the main student lobby a little before 9 p.m. to see if anyone was going to be watching The Office. Turns out, like half of the people in this whole program are avid Office watchers, so it was so much fun to watch the best show ever with a ton of people. Plus, it was three hours before anybody there in California could have watched it, so we took pleasure in making our friends at home miserable with our superior knowledge. It was a HILARIOUS episode. "You will have pancakes. And you will like it."

That was pretty much yesterday.

Today we were supposed to have class at 9 a.m., but apparently it wasn't until 10 a.m., so we were all there too early. Lame. But then we had class at 10 a.m., and it was about very confusing stuff with this guy named Niebuhr and how he thinks Christ interacts with culture. Interesting but very confusing.

Then we had a two-hour lunch break, so my scavenger hunt group and I headed out to kill two birds with one stone. We went to the National Press Club first, got our membership cards and saw the piano played by Harry Truman while Lauren Bacall sat on it. There's a very famous picture of it or something. Then we went to the Willard Hotel, where the term "lobbyist" was originally coined by Ulysses S. Grant. Then we realized we were right by the White House, so we went over to look at it and met a bunch of different protesting groups. Small protests, though, not San Francisco style.

The March for Life people that protested yesterday were there, with a ton of flowers they had used symbolically. They were giving them away, so I took some and brought them back to the apartment, so we have pretty flowers to brighten our living area!

Then we had class again this afternoon, which was REALLY interesting. It was all about Christian interaction with pop culture, and the different ways that Christians react to it. I was very intrigued by the whole thing.

My scavenger hunt group and I headed out AGAIN after that class to finish our last hunt clues. We went to the Weekly Standard's newsroom and the Watergate building complex. And we were finally finished!!! So we went to Starbucks because we were exhausted and sat there talking as a group for about an hour. Then we headed back. On the way back, I got a text from another girl in WJC from Biola asking if I wanted to meet her and some people for dinner, so one of the girls from my hunt group came with me, and we went with like, 7 people to this great little place called Old Ebbit's Grill right next to the White House. It was pretty much just American food, but it was very good, and we had a really good time. Everyone here gets along extremely well, so it's exciting to meet everybody and learn more and more about them.

After dinner (which we didn't finish until 10:30 p.m.) we just headed back to the apartments. Now I'm writing this. Tomorrow I'm going with some of my roommates and Karin to see some of the monuments. And I have to finish the video of my scavenger hunt and put it online. So tomorrow night, you will have a lovely video link to watch! Fun for you!