You have to or you want to?

What? Volunteering for the SHARE program
Where? Pulaski
When? Third Saturday of each month.

The wife of one of my colleagues is in charge of managing the SHARE program. http://www.swva.net/nrca/pages/SHARE.HTML
In a nutshell, SHARE is a grassroots initiative to obtain food for charitable organizations at incredibly reduced prices. The charitable organizations (mostly churches and 3rd-age residences) select the type and amount of food that they want per month from the webpage referenced above. The SHARE program puts all the orders together, and gets the food by the truckload. This turns out to be very cheap.

Once a month (usually the third Saturday of each month), trailers come with the food in big pallets. This is where my involvement with this program begins. The pallets need to be taken from the trailer into the warehouse, and the orders for each charitable organization need to be put together from the different pallets. I usually work in the walk-in freezer, where perishable goods such as meat, fish, and pies are stored. Of course, I am such a doofus that the first time I was not wearing two pairs of socks, gloves, or a hat. Unlike the goods described above, it turns out that humans are extremely perishable when left in a walk-in freezer, so I had a rough time.

A particularly attractive feature of this program is that it hosts a variety of teenagers who need to do community service for getting in trouble, along with prisoners who want to be outside for a few hours. The troubled teenagers are particularly interesting to work with. I worked with four of them recently. They looked like just simple, plain teenagers, of the kind that one can see in TV series. However, for whatever reason, they got drunk and stole their dad's car, or beat somebody up. I really wanted to learn what was behind each of them, and see if I could help them. So, I tried to strike up conversation with the ones that seemed more upbeat. The first question that I was asked was: Are you here because you have to, or because you want to? When I said that I was there because I wanted to, they looked at me in disbelief, and added that they needed to be there to avoid jail time. Some of them were good boys, but some of them were really troubled. Particularly, there was one who would not do anything at all. He would just seat around, don't look at you in the eye, and refuse to collaborate. The sad part of the story is that we are supposed to report if this happens, and then they might go to jail. Of course, I did not report anything. I just wish I had known how to say the right words to help that boy. I have a lot to learn.