Finding food, friends and faith at work
YES! (Young Enough to Serve) is a local Christian organization focusing on making life's second half count. Last month they gathered a team of volunteers from six churches in three states and headed to Dinuba near Fresno to work with Gleanings for the Hungry.
This is the 16th consecutive year that a YES! team worked at Gleanings. This year they focused on soup and quilt production. The soup goes to places such as the Philippines, where it fed 66,000 children in 2022. It also goes to Nicaragua where 90,000 children at 900 centers are fed everyday. The daily meal allowed them to go to school instead of begging or working for food.
Becky Lamoly's favorite part of working at Gleanings was bonding with people from different parts of the country in a united mission to help humanity. When the YES! team arrived, her husband noticed a team member who he had admired when they had lived in the same town two years before.They were both farriers. Now volunteering for work neither had thought the other would be interested in, they shared laughter and stories, becoming deeper friends.
40 years
Gleanings just celebrated 40 years of feeding the hungry throughout the world. A large part of their mission is procuring and producing shelf stable food. In the summer they dry peaches and nectarines that are not pristine enough for sale. I've donated bits of money to them over the years and remember my son waving a sandwich bag holding a handful of dried peaches
and asking, “Are these the hundred dollar peaches?”
Many different groups of volunteers do short term work at Gleanings. Deborah Wood, just back from the trip with YES!, wrote, “I chose to spend a service week at Gleanings because I wanted to do my part to feed the desperately hungry in the world. When I heard YES! was assembling a team, the call to go resonated within. Both of my kids had served at Gleanings years ago when they were in a Youth Group.
“My experience was unforgettable! I loved being part of a cohesive team of Christians who arrived with the heart to serve. We worked together, sideby-side packaging soup mix. At the week's end, we had packaged 90,000 pounds of soup mix which will make 633,000 servings. (That is 2 ½ cargo containers that you see on trains and on ships) It's remarkable how many loving hands touched that soup mix before it was even placed into the cargo container. The jobs were physically
harder than I expected, and we all came home exhausted and sore!”
Sew what?
In the quilting room, Deborah noticed a backlog of bundles on the rack to be sewn. Someone had already cut the 10 ½ inch squares and another person had designed the squares into a pleasing pattern. However, no volunteers were sewing the blocks together. Deborah took it as a personal challenge to clear the backlog. She finished about 2 ½ quilt tops (the surface area of a queen bed) each day.
Although the quilts were in different stages of completion at the beginning,15 quilts were completed, and other quilt tops were lined up for batting and backs. Many will go to Syrians affected by the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
The volunteers heard remarkable stories about the soup mix arriving to starving people in Haiti, Ukraine, Columbia, South Africa and the Philippines.
Beautiful paintings by Chris DeJong that hung in the dining room put faces to the work at hand. One speaker had been homeless and living at the dump in Manilla when food from Gleanings reached her family and changed her life. That life, saved and turned around, now works with Gleanings helping others in need.
Faith, friends and family
Wes Wick, who leads YES! with his wife Judy, has been known to refer to Gleanings' Mission Base as, “Our time-share in Dinuba.” This year's team had people in their 70s, a plethora of middle aged and younger people, including their three grandchildren aged 8, 6 and 3. Judy considered it, “pure Joy!”
Peter Burke, father of those three boys, took a week off work to spend with his family at Gleanings. He felt a strong sense of purpose working alongside genuine followers of Christ, to help feed the hungry around the world. The Gleanings staff and other volunteers adopted the boys within a few days. It was such a joy, Peter writes, to see the family embraced by so many humble, loving people.
The boys gained an appreciation for hard work, new friends and memories that may add to their understanding of how to live as a Christ follower in our fallen world.
To contact Wes about YES! and their plans for next year, visit yestoserve. org or call 831-359-5308. To see other ways to contribute to this ministry, visit gleanings.org.
“I didn't find my friends, the good God gave them to me.”