All morning Thursday and Friday we worked in the Vineyard’s warehouse. Where Vineyard’s location currently is in the middle of the downtown area, but it is an old Dunne’s food market place. Just a few months ago they were able to purchase a seven acre lot with buildings already on the area, all for the price of a two or three acre lot. They are building a building that will be able to for over 1100 people in each service, and has places for the youth to meet, and for the children to run around if they need to. On this site, there is a huge warehouse where they store thousands of clothes that were donated to them. This is where Hope and Gloria’s get some of their clothes for their store. We could call this warehouse the Compassion Warehouse, because everything they have in there is for the Compassion Project. Compassion Project is something that the church has that pretty much helps out the community every way possible. Examples can be the food giveaway on Sundays, Hope and Gloria’s, Healing on the Streets, as well as helping pay for some people’s salaries. For these two days all we did was work in the warehouse and get ready for next Saturday where they are having a huge Car Boot Sale. This is pretty much a flea market, mostly clothes, and there can be street vendors that come in and pay to set up their things. Almost everything they make goes to the Compassion Project. What our contact had us do was sort through the hundreds of bags of clothes to see if they were good, bad, women’s, men’s, children, and who knows what! While this was all happening, I decided to wash everybody’s clothes. I thought this was a good idea at the time, but little did I know that 20 people had a lot of clothes they wanted washed over these past few days. Ridiculous. I told the leaders that if one more person asked for something to be hand washed, or only washed in a certain temperature, I was going to put bleach on all of the clothes and ruin them. : ) After two days of washing clothes, I am now a professional. (Mom and dad, this does NOT mean that I will be taking charge of the laundry whenever I come back, sorry!) We also found some shoes and clothes that were cute enough to keep for the month, or to keep for the race! Here is a wonderful picture of me, (still sick) doing laundry for everybody.
I will say that this was not even half of the clothes that were washed. Even though it was a really slow washer and dryer, I was just thankful not to have to wash everybody’s underwear by hand. There is still so much to do, and so little time to do this by! Saturday is coming quickly, but I know that in the end, it will be so much fun to work at, and it will be so worth putting all of the time in to do this!
Quote of the day: You should have seen it in color!
– In the kitchen, eating and cooking dinner, and singing country songs. Christina is from the north, and had not heard most of these songs, and when she heard Should Have Seen it in Color, starting crying hysterically, so I did too. 🙂
