Gleaning

gleaningGleaning was the solution that came to mind for me (the Book of Ruth). The food bank that we volunteer for, by working in their garden, is the North County Pantry Food Pantry . It has not had any donations of POTATOES for months.

I asked my friend upstairs about that before I went to sleep that night. A couple of days later, I got a call from my friend at our previous church. At On Fire Ministries. there was a lady organizing a gleaning trip just south of Ritzville. She worked with farms there. We called her and told her of this need, so we were included in her Gleaning Trip on Friday morning.

Our initial plan was to recruit others and meet at 8 am FRIDAY morning at their church and then have all of us drive 2 hours and pick the potatoes in the field all day. We hoped to fill pick-up trucks and bring them back to their church school and our food pantry.

Volunteers?

I started asking everyone I know if they would like to join us on this adventure without getting a single volunteer at the garden or church to reply with a yes. I turned to my Facebook page, which succeeded in generating 5 likes and zero volunteers. Finally, it was posted in our community  “Elk/Deer Park/Chattaroy – Neighbors Helping Neighbors Page“. This private group has 6,100 members in it and is quite active on a day-to-day basis.  But, the request for help produced 4 likes and 2 comments and absolutely no volunteers. Terri was as unsuccessful as we were in getting volunteers to step up to the plate.

That didn’t stop us though. Regardless of how many did not volunteer, we were excited about this opportunity.