I volunteered at the neighborhood food bank/pantry again today. Like last week I was put on what I guess is the “starch and carbs” station:
- One from a selection of a bag of flour, a bag of baking mix, or a bag of generic corn flakes cereal
- One or the other of a packet of spaghetti noodles or rice
- a can of pureed pumpkin
I had more to keep track of this week, and there was something in the air. The first people to draw numbers for their place in the line got high ones: in the 90s and 100s. They didn’t want high numbers because the better items are long gone by the last 25 or so people, but the food bank folks don’t allow do-overs. Then a general mood hit and everybody started crowding for their number, a few people darted past the line control people and tried to get a second number, and it got a little rowdy.
Once things settled down and people started coming down the line I found it pretty hard to communicate “one from this group of three, one from this set of two.” Most of the patrons are elderly Asian folks, so there’s a language barrier that both sides of the table try to mitigate with broad gestures and repetition.
I realized about five minutes in that the line is just sort of set up wrong for those conditions:
When you have a pair of crates side-by-side with bags of rice in one and bags of noodles in the other and no way to communicate what “one” means in that context when “one or the other” doesn’t mean anything to the other person, there’s a lot of gesturing and a few attempts to just take one of each, and then some unhappiness when you ask for them to put one back (with a lot of gesturing and repeating and some of the other volunteers weighing in because nothing breaks down language barriers like everyone yelling in unison).
So I rearranged my station:
- The flour, cereal, and baking mix all went in one column.
- The rice and noodles went in another column.
- The pumpkin puree just sat there. I said to the coordinator at the start of the shift, “guessin’ that’s not gonna fly off the shelves” and got a wry smile.
Set up thus, I could just make eye contact, hold my hand out over a column, say “one,” and it seemed much more clear that I meant “one from this column.” And that was great, partly because it just helped things move along and partly because having removed the overhead of gesticulating, repeating, and the hurt feelings of people having to put things back, people were more inclined to say thank you, or make jokes about wanting more than one, and I had more time to help them load their bags or remember to hand things over with both hands when they preferred that I hand things to them.
It did mean I had to keep more stuff readily at hand and I had to more frequently re-up my columns, but I think a concentrated 60 or 70 minutes of moving a little quickly for the sake of making it less sucky was a good tradeoff.
This week we ran out of rice early. Plenty of Funyuns, same as last week. The coordinator tells me the money has been drying up, so they can’t buy the staples, but donations of junk food tend to be plentiful.