Charlie’s Place, Martha’s Table and Fishing School (day 2)

The alarm went off at 5 A.M on Wednesday. None of us wanted to wake up for our morning shift at Charlie’s Place, a place that serves breakfast for homeless people 3 days a week. We got to Charlie’s Place at 6 in the morning and were assigned to three different group, one in the kitchen, one outside setting up and serving food and one organizing the clothes to give out to homeless people.  Steph, Cara and myself helped setting up the tables and prepare to serve hot tea, coffee and pastry before the breakfast program began. Meanwhile, Monica, Plamena and Caroline were in the kitchen making cinnamon buttered toast. Our whole team was surprised by how good the toast tasted and took back to CSM most of the leftover toasts of the day and finished them that night. The rest of our team, Jason, Nicole and Chelsea arranged the clothing Charlie’s Place had so that they could easily hand out the clothes later when people come in. Each person were able to receive three items of their choice, in addition to some vitamins, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoos, etc. While serving food, the DuPont plunging team were very surprised to see one of the people they talked to during Urban Plunge at Charlie’s Place, however he did not seem to recognize them. When breakfast was over, most of the homeless people helped us clean up, mop the floor, etc. The director of the place, Paul said that these men come everyday, they sit at the same place everytime and read their newspaper, then they help him clean up the place.

We finish at Charlie’s Place around 8 A.M. However, we were no longer tired. We all enjoyed the homey feeling of Charlie’s Place so much we got excited to head to Martha’s Table. We expected to do something similar to Charlie’s Palec at Martha’s Table. However, our expectations were wrong. We packed bags of canned food, pasta, vegetable for families that can provide food for them for a whole month. We could see our accomplishments here by looking at the amount of brown bags we packed stacked around the room we were working. We packed more than 100 bags of food that day.

We had lunch around 11 A.M after Martha’s Table. After that we prepared ourselves for day 2 of the fishing school. Some of us were a little worried because of such an exhausting experience the day before. However, we all loved the kids at the school that day! They were all so cooperative and actually got most of their work done. We had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant. The food was very different than anything most of us had ever tried. There was no silverware and we ate everything with our hands