Ah the sweet taste of plans falling through. I've gone through about 4 processes of planning and attempting to volunteer at places and today was the closest I have gotten. The first attempt I wrangled was that of working at my church's food drive, but knowing my poor sleeping tendencies, I overslept and missed it. No big deal. Yet. Next I tried to volunteer at my local little league but rain rescheduled the date and I happened to be busy on the new day. Now I'm a little frustrated. After 2 fails, I decide I'm going to just use my youth group I attend every week, but after doing as usual I realize I totally forgot to take pictures... also I later talked to Mr. Speckels and he gave the advice of stepping out of my comfort zone a little more. At this point I'm angry and baffled on what I should do. Then this morning I hear Joaquin and Bryan talking about volunteering today so I decide to jump on and join them. Things were finally going my way!
So we talk it all out and we plan that Bryan is going to go straight to the place we are volunteering (Tri-City Volunteer) after school while me and Joaquin go home first and I follow Joaquin there. Trusting Joaquin as a seeing eye dog, I don't look for the place at all. We go down Peralta and Joaquin informs me that he doesn't know where it is. Great. We spend about half an hour looking for the place and I decide that I am going to lead and find the place. Being the man of the group I find it in about 5 minutes. Joaquin humbly thanks me and we trudge toward our destination.
We arrive at Tri-City Volunteer and I had no clue what this place even was. I was just along for the ride. I look around and we are basically in the ghetto, I see gang members, stray dogs, and homeless people wandering around. I desperately look for the entrance without being distracted by the noise of a car alarm and read that this is a pantry. Oh so we are serving homeless, I can do this. Joaquin calls Bryan and he says he is already working so we rush in. At first sight the place seems small and somewhat dirty then we get led to a factory type area with tons of potatoes and other food everywhere, next we follow our leader into an office where we were given paperwork to fill out. Well, the paper work took a little while and we go back to the manager and he says it is too late to work. There is some arguing whether we should be able to get half an hour and we are taken to the factory area to talk to someone about whether we should work. On the way we see Bryan as well as our former classmate, JAVIER. The man ended up telling us to come back tomorrow and thats what we plan on doing.
In the end this was another fail but I felt like this blog post was rather necessary. We at least came close to volunteering and we definitely have a commitment to do it tomorrow. I am excited to see what is in store for us and I hope I learn a lot.
Signed - John
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