Our siyur today was to Rehovot, a small town south of Tel Aviv, where an organization called Leket gleans fields of excess for the needy. This organization was the one I originally wanted to intern with while I was here, but unfortunately they are not based in Jerusalem and don't have enough volunteer work here to keep me busy for 4 days a week. Needless to say, I was super excited about the opportunity to spend a part of my afternoon with them, knowing that my efforts would go appreciated.
As usual, we had Israel Update and breakfast in the Beit Knesset (the main building at Beit Ar-El) and even had some time to come back to our own apartments to get ready to leave). Around 11:30 our bus arrived and we hopped on. A little over an hour into the ride, we arrive at the field in Rehovot, none of us really with a clue as to what we are doing, but we are all happy and ready to volunteer. We meet Amir, who is wearing jeans and a shirt, tzitzit (fringes from a small prayer shawl worn underneath the clothing) and basically - a cowboy hat. Once he starts speaking, I can tell he's from NY, just not exactly sure where. As it turns out, he is from Long Island. Anyways, we meet our Israeli orthodox cowboy who tells us what Leket is and does - mostly food rescue, so that it can be spread over many people and many families - and explains what we will be doing on the farm. Today...we pick oranges!!!
Yeah so the oranges are really green and yellow, but that's neither here nor there. He shows us where the buckets are, so we can bring them to the orange trees for picking. Rachelle and I fill up a bucket in a few minutes, and bring it back to the large crates that take them on trucks to where they are necessary. We finish the first tree, move to the next one, and even across the path to another row of trees. Many pounds (or should I say kilos) later, we have an even more filled bucket of green and yellow oranges (hmm wait, what? that's not confusing at all), and we take it to dump it in the big crate. We were only picking for about 45 minutes but altogether, we managed to collect 500 kilgrams of oranges for the needy. Not too shabby! 500 kilos = about 1,100 pounds, divided by the approximately 15 people we had, and that's 73 pounds per person in that time period. That's over 1.6 pounds per minute. Dang skippy.
We all got free t-shirts for volunteering (another one to add to the "sleepy pile" collection in my closet) and went back to the bus to drive to the Leket warehouse in Ra'anana. It was a fair drive, about 45 minutes, so it was kind of a bummer to have already spent so much time inside on such a beautiful day, but sometimes you just have to make those sacrifices to do mitzvahs. We arrive at the warehouse, and we are met by Natalie, one of the staff members. She gives us a brief overview of how the warehouse functions, as a temporary holding spot for food from all over the place, until it is quickly redistributed to those needy families, schoolchildren, soup kitchens, anywhere. She gave us a short tour of the warehouse so we could see the items being stocked and stored. She explained why it was so empty in there - because they try to get the food out to constituents as quickly as possible. Makes sense. The food does no one any good while its sitting in a cooler or on a stack of crates. This made me really happy. We only spent about 30 minutes here before hopping back on the bus to return to Jerusalem. Another long ride back, so multiple hours today spent sitting on a bus. But well worth it to see these two places in action.
For anyone interested in more information about Leket or to make a donation: http://www.leket.org/english/
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