Bug volunteers at the Pine Street Inn
On our trip to Bug+ Boston the team wanted to
contribute a bit of our elbow grease to help out in the community. We came across a great organization, called Pine Street Inn , who was willing to let us park our rented RV in their lot and teach us what goes into feeding the hungry.
I think ‘volunteering’ doesn’t generally come across as a fun word – especially after a long night of Bug+ing. But we had a blast. We cracked hundreds of eggs, mixed hundreds of pounds of ground beef with our hands (in sanitary gloves, of course), delicately arranged hundreds of lasagna noodles, and wrapped hundreds of sandwiches. All told, I would guess our small team prepared a big 1,700 meals or so. Where we generally spend our mental efforts on issues like configuration compatibility and making sure a service tracker doesn’t interfere with application code, we suddenly found ourselves focused on the very different, bigger, but simpler task of feeding and distributing thousands of meals.
We knew Pine Street Inn had a great cafeteria service for all who came in, and that they had a night outreach program to bring food to the hungry. We didn’t know Pine Street was a big, efficient, and caring powerhouse firing on all cylinders (unlike the motorhome), allowing homeless people to secure permanent housing and get on the path to self-sufficiency. We saw a clean and welcoming emergency shelter where 700 individuals sleep every night – which includes the largest shelter and resource for women in New England. There was medical and psychiatric services, job training, literacy programs, work programs, elder programs, and outreach teams bringing food, clothing, blankets, medical assistance, and compassion to streets every night.
I don’t know how all this gets done. Obviously, it takes tons of activity, energy, resources, passion, and compassion. What would happen if places like Pine Street Inn didn’t exist? How can we be more
involved in our communities? I think I can speak for us all when I say that spending a few hours at Pine Street allowed a glimpse at the bigger (more real) world that we tend to forget about when we are
living our lives.
