Spring Break AWOL 2014: Sun Burnt and Shoveling

Yes, I know I am a day behind in this whole blogging thing, I apologize. I am trying to keep on track, but sleep is important after working hard all day (especially if you aren't used to working hard :)). So you all are probably wondering what happened on Work Day 2 (Monday). So Adventures from Monday included the Weld County Food Bank and a fish farm.

Adventure 1: Sort and Safety Check

Our group getting a tour of the Food Bank!

We began our day around 8 am as we traveled to the Weld County Food Bank in Greeley, CO. Once we arrived we were given a tour by Cheri. We learned about the 9 million pounds of food the food bank provides yearly. 1 in 3 children (1 in 6 people) will go home hungry each day in Weld County alone, but with the help of Weld County Food Bank and many volunteers like ourselves, these people will have food on their tables each day. Among the many operations going on throughout the food bank was the "Sort and Safety Check." We got the privilege to do this job for a few hours. This included checking the expiration date on HUNDREDS of cans, as well as checking for any dings or dents in the can. Then we would sort the cans into the corresponding labeled box. We managed to finish off three big containers full of cans. The picture off to the right shows our group trying to fit into one of these containers, now imagine that full of cans just waiting to be checked. That was our job! Below are some more pictures of the sort and safety check process!


Part of our group removing debris.

Adventure 2: What's a fish farm?

After a morning at the food bank we traveled to a local fish farm where a family needed our help to remove debris from their tree line. We jumped out of the van and immediately grabbed our rakes and shovels to remove the multitude of foreign objects, not to mention some live critters! Yeah, that's right we found a few mice and a couple toads amongst the debris! AH! We continued on working to clear out all the debris from a section of trees. After a few hours and hundreds of branches later, we went to go tour of the Fish Farm. For those of you who don't know what a fish farm is, don't worry because I didn't either. But a fish farm is basically like any other farm where animals are raised to sell for certain purposes. In this case fish are being sold to stock lakes or to sell to local restaurants. The fish farm we went to had over 30 tanks (100 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 4 feet deep) full of fish. Each individual tank contained 30,000 fish, about 160,000 in the "big fish" house and well over 300,000 in the "small/baby fish" house. We got to walk through each house, carefully because we didn't want to fall into the tanks and watch them feed the thousands of fish. SO COOL! After learning a tremendous amount about the business of fish farming we went down the road to meet their cattle and pigs before heading back to campus. And who knew one could get sun burn when there is still snow on the ground? Not me! And that is the reason my face is completely burnt! Spring Break is Hard.