River Food Pantry Reflection

While I reflect back on Round Three and my experiences with the program itself, I have conflicting feelings. While I feel that I have accomplished more than I assumed I would, I concede that I could have achieved more for the communities I served and for my team. While I remain the finickiest eater on my team, I consumed and appreciated foods that my younger self would not have even considered. I also had the opportunity to witness and experience endeavors that I never thought I would. One of these was hiking up a 14,000 foot mountain. This might have been one of the more difficult activities that I have done in my life in regards to challenging my capability to persevere. When I received news that the team would be working with the American Red Cross, I became particularly excited since it would offer additional work and experiences about disaster and emergency relief. I

Madison, Wisconsin also had a large number of enjoyable volunteer opportunities. The prevailing influential of these was The River Food Pantry, which is the largest food pantry in the Madison area. The River typically has at least 150 individuals or families receive assistance per day. For at least once or twice per week I volunteered there, therefore, when the team deployed to assist with the South Carolina flood disaster, it disappointed me that I could no longer volunteer there. I had contradictory feelings about the team’s deployment to South Carolina, on one hand it meant that we would be able to directly assist the flood survivors, alternately this meant that I said goodbye to people that I began to enjoy working with and abandoned all the plans for the last few weeks of the round that I became enthusiastic about. However, I knew when I signed up for this program that it meant that I could no longer construct my schedule purely around individual interests. During my experience being deployed to the South Carolina flooding, I was overwhelmed with the extent of the damage that