She's leaving home...

I'm just about all packed, but it has taken the whole weekend! Can't believe how much I have to do to get ready to leave. But, it's done. Tomorrow I leave for Tim and Laurene's, spend the night there, then on to Nova Scotia.

Today is Firecracker Day, aka Victoria Day, Queen Victoria's birthday. Here in Ontario it's close to Canada Day in importance, the first long weekend of the summer, the first chance for all the little firebugs to set off firecrackers to their hearts' content. Although it is quite cold now, unseasonably so.

Now that we got all our plants in the ground we are worrying that they might freeze, even though the Victoria Day weekend is supposed to be safe. That's the second important thing about the old Queen's birthday, it's the official garden planting weekend at least here in Ontario. Supposed to be well clear of chances of frost. Huh! Hear that weatherman?

Well, so long Toronto, will miss you.

Oh I almost forgot, I wanted to post a photo of the folks I work with at the foodbank. I took this picture at the end of last week's shift. Gonna miss these guys too.

Back in Parkdale

This post is not going to be about my trip to Belize, but I will get to it soon. I do have a bunch of things I want to say about that trip.

However...

...This is the first picture I took, at the Belize International Airport.


Welcome to the tropics!

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I've been back for two days now and am just starting to get organized again. Seems like the first day was just a daze of disorientation and the second day pretty much taken up with catching up and my foodbank shift. I still haven't managed to get out to do some grocery shopping.

I did start my To Do list for getting ready to go to Nova Scotia though. My plan is to leave here around mid-month, but that's next week and my list is long so I think end of the month is more realistic. As long as it's May though.

I had fun at the foodbank, telling folks about my trip and getting caught up with goings on there. Amy is back, she was away for six weeks travelling in Central America, everywhere except Belize! When I came in she was washing the floor, something she often does on her shift.

I am caught in a bit of a dilemma about giving out food. On the one hand I am aware of how many people are lined up and trying to make the quantities of food last so everyone gets some, but on the other hand we ought to be generous to folks until the supply is gone. And often, I look at the shelves and make a mental calculation based on how much I see there, only to find out mid-shift that actually we have a whole lot more in the basement that we can use up. I never know how much of the stuff in the basement we can use now and how much is for other days of the week that the foodbank is open.

I've been leaning toward making the food last, but one patron yesterday called me "hard" and Dennis said to me that he believed we should be generous with the folks at the front of the line because they waited a long time and ought to be rewarded for that. So I'm thinking about that. It's a complicated issue, I haven't really gone into all the details, suffice to say I might try the "generous" route next time.

One guy came in and told us that he had just gotten out of jail that day, so I did load him up with food, even stuff we were reserving for families with kids. And Robert went down in the basement and dug up some special treats for him. I like that, kind of celebrating his big day.

I mentioned to Daphne, our shift team leader, that I hadn't gotten around to buying groceries yet so she insisted that I take some foodbank food. We had some stuff donated by Costco, large trays of some kind of pasta dinner, french fries, and fruit salad. But we couldn't distribute it because we didn't have containers to serve it in. I was trying to figure out how to take some of the Costco stuff since it was probably going to go to waste anyway. Dennis came up with the idea of using one plastic bag as a kind of glove/serving spoon, and another plastic bag to scoop the pasta into. So I did that for the pasta and the french fries, and Dennis did too (to take a break from cooking). Daphne found some chocolate pudding tubs for me, and I took a loaf of German rye bread (not even expired yet!!!) that was left over at the end of the shift.

It's not great food but it beats shopping and cooking when you're tired. And it makes me feel like "one of the guys" to be eating from the foodbank too. Don't make a regular thing of it because I don't want to take food that other folks need way more than I do, but don't want to be stand-offish about it either.

Another foodbank day

Just got back from the foodbank. Gorgeous day. Started out with thunder and lightning, but by mid-afternoon it was really warm and sunny.

Two weeks ago at the foodbank things were quite dismal, hardly any food available. It's depressing when that happens, you have to tell folks that you don't have much to give them and they are so disappointed. One patron said he heard on the radio that donations were down, that folks give lots at Christmas and the early part of the winter, but as spring approaches, donations go down.

So someone from Daily Bread, the foodbank mothership here in Toronto, went on air to ask for donations and last week we were swimming in food! It was amazing! Meat, milk, fresh veggies, lots of canned goods, lots of bread. But we were also inundated in patrons, it was an exhausting shift. Usually things quiet down after an hour or so and the second half of the shift is fairly leisurely, but last week we were run off our feet until closing time.

Today we had lots of food again but not so many people, so it was a bit more relaxed. The only excitement was a fight broke out on the sidewalk in front of our door. I don't think they were our patrons, just passersby. Two women, just pounding each other out and shoving each other against our door. Nobody wanted to open the door to let our patrons out for fear of getting involved in this fight. But one of the volunteers finally did open the door and yelled at the women that we had called the police. They left pretty quick. It was true, someone had called the police, but it was funny because none of us knew the address! I was trying to read it backwards on the glass of the front door.

My favourite fellow volunteer, Dennis, was there today. He didn't come last week because he put his back out. We sure could have used him last week! I teased him, told him how hard we all had to work because he wasn't there. He just laughed. I told him I was going away soon, he said he'd miss me. Aw shucks!

One very tiny older woman I was going to take through had a handful of plastic bags to put food in, and she said she had to blow her nose so she was fumbling with the bags and I offered to take the bags while she got out her kleenex. I actually reached for the bags and touched them, which really upset her. She told me off. Told me I was interfering with her freedom as a human being. I of course backed right off and apologized to her, several times even. She was really put out.

To change the subject I asked if she was ready now to get some food so she followed me to the food area, but kept lecturing me about how it was inappropriate to touch her. I agreed and said I wouldn't do that again. After I'd partially filled one of her bags she relented and said it upset her but she realized I didn't do it on purpose. But I better not do it again. Finally after we'd filled her bags and she was ready to leave she asked me my name. When I told her it was Anne, she grinned ear to ear and told me that was her middle name. She was very happy to meet another Anne. So I guess we're friends now.

My very own Easter bunny

In honour of the first day of spring and the coming Easter weekend, I am posting a photo of my 'roommate', Bunny. And a lovely roommate she is! This is her 'good' side, she's blind in her other eye due to a raccoon attack a couple of years ago.







Wednesday afternoon is my shift at the foodbank, near the end of the shift we were told there would be a meeting right afterward for all volunteers, a kind of Q&A session to keep us up to date on what was happening with the foodbank. A few of us sat around waiting for the meeting to begin and speculating on some of the rumours about what this meeting was all about. None of which proved to be true, as rumours usually aren't.

Anyway, how shall I say this, it was a 'spirited' exchange? A lot of stuff got said, perhaps a good deal of it that shouldn't have been, but on the other hand maybe it should have. I don't know! Definitely left me wondering about the future. And sufficiently tense that I did not sleep all that well last night.

Somehow I am going to put all that out of my mind and try to carry on as just a once-a-week volunteer. I get a real positive kick from being there on Wednesday afternoons, I don't want to give that up. I like that each week at least one patron expresses the opinion that they are glad I am there. Don't want to give that up either. I am growing familiar with some of the faces, enjoy greeting people that come by regularly and enjoy working with volunteers who appear to be enjoying the same things I am.

I know there are problems, after all, the very existence of a foodbank is a statement about the problem with how our society and culture works. But I like that I can send people on their way out the door with smiles on their faces, that they get more than just groceries when they come by. And so do I.

Foodbank day

Wednesday is my foodbank day. With my cold I was not wanting to go in yesterday, but I didn't want them thinking I was some kind of flake who shows up once and never returns. I probably wasn't doing them any favours though, coughing all over their food. Well, I did try to aim at my sleeve not their faces or their food, but still.

I met another volunteer there who just moved to Toronto from California last July, same time I moved here. She was a teacher in California and is looking for a teaching job here, but says she half hopes she doesn't find one because she kind of likes being off work and able to do things like volunteering at the foodbank.

Due to the snow the Second Harvest truck came very late. It usually comes around 1.00 pm, but this time it was close to 3.00 pm when it arrived, and the foodbank closes at 4.00 pm. We were running out of food so we were giving people the choice of going through now and getting what little there was, or waiting for more and better after the truck came. People were quite patient with waiting.

When the truck did arrive we tried to unload it through the front door onto King St, but the only place the truck could park blocked the streetcars so the driver had to go around to the back of the building and we unloaded it there. It meant hauling boxes the full length of the foodbank and through the waiting area, but it went pretty well, some of the patrons helped unload. There was no meat and no milk, but there was yogurt and chocolate milk and lots of fresh fruit.

My new job: foodbank volunteer

As the weatherman predicted, lots of snow on Wednesday. 30 cm., setting a record here for amount of snow in a single day. Started in the night, took a breather in the morning and then back at it in the afternoon and evening.

On Tuesday night I went to a meeting of the Operating Committee of the Parkdale Foodbank, at St Francis' Table. This is an outreach centre operated by of a small group of Capuchin-Franciscan friars who up until recently ran the foodbank, then called St. Philip's Pantry. But last fall it was decided that this was no longer part of their mandate, so the foodbank is being cut loose. Which means among other things that all of a sudden it's on the hook for $2000 a month in rent. So since that time the volunteers at the foodbank have been scrambling to save the foodbank, since it is actually the last foodbank in Parkdale, one of the poorer areas of the city. The whole thing got some media attention last November and there's been a lot of people stepping forward to volunteer and donate funds, and Brother John of St. Francis' Table is trying to get the foodbank on a self-supporting footing. The Operating Committee was formed to do that.

I met someone from that committee a couple of weeks ago and she suggested I come to this meeting. At the meeting the chairperson Robert suggested that I spend some time volunteering at the foodbank before getting any further involved and on Wednesday I did my first shift. They have a storefront on King St. Folks come in the back door and register at a desk where they are given a number. Volunteers lead each person through the front part of the store where the food is laid out on shelves and help them pick out a week's worth of groceries.

The people who get there first get slightly better choices than the people who arrive later. Things like milk and eggs are in short supply, fresh fruit and veggies are of variable quality. It's all pretty friendly, many of the volunteers are on welfare themselves, or live in the area, or both. A lot of immigrants pass through Parkdale, it's where many get their start in Canada.

Toronto has a very large Tibetan population, the largest in Canada. Many of them came here from the U.S. and already speak English fairly well. Many came to the U.S. in the 1990s on tourist visas, and when their visas expired they had to leave. In 1998-2001 over a thousand of them moved from New York to Toronto. Queen St. has a lot of Tibetan craft stores and restaurants, although it's unclear to me who eats there other than Tibetans since Tibetan cuisine is not exactly in high demand. Anyway, the foodbank users include many Tibetans, some Sudanese refugees, and lots of other groups.

Michael supervises the shifts, he oriented me by walking through with a patron and describing how he decides how much they can have. There are signs saying how much per order, but you have to make judgments based on how many people in the household and that kind of thing. Michael knows everyone. For instance one man that I led through Michael told me that he had recently been kicked out of his place and hadn't made it to the foodbank the previous week, so he should get double rations. And sometimes they want to make deals with you (like maybe no veggies but more bread) and that's OK too. You have to know what's in short supply and what you can be liberal with. And you have to stay with them so you can keep an eye on what they take. They leave by the front door, which has to be locked after each person leaves.

The first half hour is really hectic, I think we had forty people come through, then over the next three hours another forty people came. Forty people doesn't sound like a lot but when you have four patrons and four volunteers trying to pick food in that tiny space, well, it's crowded. The foodbank is open three days a week and people are only supposed to come once a week. But all these rules get bent for particular patrons.

I should have brought a bottle of water with me, I got really thirsty and all there was to drink was really strong coffee. When they first opened the doors there was pizza and coffee, so early patrons got that while they waited their turns. It pays to go early!

Robert came by late in the shift and talked to Daphne, another older woman volunteering there, and I about possibly starting a mentoring program. Another woman that I met the night before, Sue-Anne, suggested this idea and Robert has decided that it's a "woman thing" so he's trying to draft all the older women into it. Whatever, it does sound like an interesting idea.