No matter where a person may go, something they will always find is food. The great thing about this is that every culture and every place differs greatly from the last one. Even though we get accustomed to our own daily routines of food, a new place will always bring forth an abundance of new pleasures to your taste buds. This summer i experienced many new things, in which 3 of them strongly stood out as experiences ill never forget.
Originally im from California, but my parents are from Guatemala. I had actually never gone to guatemala,but this summer i was finally able to go. Aside from my cultural background, through most of my high school life, i was involved in a sort of youth group called Young Life. Every summer Young Life offers high school students a chance to go to summer camp for a week in which the people who serve, wash dishes, help cook, do laundry, and clean cabins are all high school students volunteering to work for free for a month long session. I had always heard word of how awesome and a great experience it was, and so my senior year of high school i decided to try it.
This volunteer work is referred to as "Work Crew". In Work Crew there are many jobs but one ive always liked is the dishwashers called "pits". this was my frist stop in my summer of fun, and as for the food, it was amazing! The Work Crew would always eat about an hour before campers, and since it was camp we would get an unlimited amount of breakfast lunch and dinner entrees every day for a month. The food varied from bacon and sausage to tacos and pizza and even steak and pork loin. The dessert would be the best part especially on giant cookie night. As good as all this food may sound, since campers would only be there a week we would repeat the same weekly cycle and by the end of the month i was sick of all the food. What made this worse was they would save some of the food to reuse for later entrees( and i mean specific items that wouldnt be touched). So i would taste some previous meal ingredients in other meals, and the funny thing is that wouldnt be the last place id see it. Pits would have to wash thousands of dishes each day including plates silverware bowls cups, all the stuff the kitchen would use andmuch more since there would be about 500 campers. The funny thing was a lot of the food would still be on plates when we would wash them as well as the dishes the kitchen would use and the smell would just keep on lingering.
If Pits wasnt hard enough, even farther back we had Deep Pits for those who didnt value their lives and for dishes too big to fit through the dishwasher. This place would have some awful smells since the enormous dishes that the kitchen used would have to be handwashed here. Sometimes we would also send dishes that we would let soak because the food would be stuck on the sides. The combinations got gruesome as we would soak multiple meal dishes in the same giant sinks and the combination of lasagna and brownie would mix into the water. on top of everything it would obviously get clogged and with no garbage disposal we had no choice but to use our hands. The smell would already be overwhelming, but the texture is unimaginable.
Although that month was extremely hard, i felt that it was worth it. It was a very spiritual experience, and helped me further my relationship with God. Not only that but it taught me a great lesson in humility, especially since the pits were always in the back, except for the occasional pits calls in which the campers would call out for us and we would run out like madmen. Besides the occasional smells that still haunt me from these repeated meals, I am extremely glad i did it, and proud of the relationships i formed and would definately recommend it.
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