Wednesday was Shared Table day. Sunday, at church, we had filled Tuzi's basement with food and hygiene products donated by St. John's members. Our "toad" PT had grandson Tony Hinkle's college stuff that he had stored in our garage for the summer. He's returning to the College of Santa Fe for classes next week and we're going to deliver his things to him in Santa Fe on the way home. Maybe all this weight contibuted to yesterday's Tuzi overheat episode.
At any rate, Wednesday morning I unloaded Tuzi:
and then packed the PT (hope you can see the generosity expressed by the Albq folks),
for transport to the El Pueblito Methodist Church.
In case this is not what you expect a northern NM church to look like, this building was once a gas station, bar and cafe. It became the church in 1960. The lower left area is the sanctuary. It was a covered driveway and gas pump island. The upstairs is now mostly storage for the Shared Table supplies.
Steve Wiard wears two hats, one as the minister at El Pueblito and one as the Director of the Shared Table food bank (although these two hats were disguised today as a Boston Red Sox cap). He introduced us around and chatted with us about his background, the church, and the program's history. We soon started helping the staff and volunteers get set up for the distribution which started at 11:00am. Susie and I helped in the toiletry section -- filling plastic bags with toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, diapers, and "personal" items. Also had school supplies for families with school-age kids.
Here's Steve, with assistant director, Helen, showcasing the day's produce.
St. John's donors brought us a lot of toothbrushes and toothpaste and they should know it was all distributed! Diapers and Depends, too. Didn't keep track of the canned food, but I'm sure it either was passed out or is stored in the pantry for future dispersal. The toothcare stuff were products they had run out of recently and they were in much demand. The policy is not to distribute willy-nilly but to provide what the folks asked for. Most everybody who came by our table asked for a toothbrush and toothpaste.
Each recipient starts off with bags of canned vegetables and fruit, plus meat, bread, and dairy products. Also, a roll of toilet paper, I noticed. The aim, Helen told us, is to provide food that a person could survive on for three days, if needed. Our understanding is that for the most part, the recipients have homes or other access to cooking facilities. Fresh corn, cabbage, apples, and potatoes were also available today. The program's food comes from individual, restaurant, and grocery donations and purchases from the Food Depot in Santa Fe. (A statistic: in 2006 the Food Depot distributed 2.5 million pounds of food and related products to some 100 agencies in seven northern NM counties.) One of the Table's part-time paid employees is a van driver who does pick ups around town. Santa Fe delivers.
Here's the fresh vegetable table with Helen and a couple of volunteers. The young man in the orange frock(?) was a volunteer named August and he had just been in town a few weeks. He was volunteering in exchange for picking up some food and supplies.
You see a slice of life here that you don't normally see. (Someone asked at home: "Taos has homeless people?) As we drove up we saw a heavily tattooed, multiply pierced young man. His tattoos were quite visible because he was wearing a low-cut, short dress and combat boots. Corporal Klinger would have been green with envy.
Everything is nice and orderly. People sign in and let the staff know how many adults and children they are representing. Last year's statistics: 5000 adults and 2000 children served.
The staff controls the flow to a leisurely progression between tables. Here are Beth and Lorraine, two volunteers who taught Susie and me the ropes on the toiletries table. We visited quite a bit with Lorraine. She and her husband retired to Taos from education careers in New York about 11 years ago, almost simultaneously with their son and daughter moving to Truth or Consequences, NM. They spend a lot of time volunteering.
After the food bank closed up here, Lorraine took the excess down to the Presbyterian Church in Ranchos de Taos, south of Taos (El Pueblito is north of town, so the two churches bracket Taos), for the afternoon distribution there. We had lunch on the way through town then joined them and helped finish up Shared Table south.
Faithful readers of our chronicle know that Susie finds people she knows, or who know people she knows, wherever we go. One of the Presby volunteers was Eddie, formerly a teacher and ultimately superintendent of Taos schools. He mentioned he went to Highlands U, in Las Vegas, NM -- Susie's alma mater. Well, he remembered her dad, Rush Hughes, a Highlands VP, and various other Highlands notables.
I slipped away and got a shot of the sanctuary. Very nice -- they recently celebrated their 100th anniversary. There used to be a Presbyterian school at the site, where Eddie started his educational journey. "If you teach them, they will come," is the philosophy that launched many Protestant schools and churches in New Mexico a century and more ago.
We did an ice cream stop on the way back to the RV park, then vegged out for a good while before making the obligatory Wal Mart run.
We'll provide more info on Rev. Steve and Shared Table in a later installment. Need to ponder a bit. Plus Blogger tends to do funny formatting to long postings.
Cheers,
Susie and Rob
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