Personal Experience: Volunteering Among The Poor In Philadelphia

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Liam Quinn WRI 141-G Prof. Melissa Freitas 9/28/15 If you are ever looking for an example of hardship and suffering among a group of people. You do not have to go much further than the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The people living in that neighborhood are the poorest of the poor in Philadelphia. If you were to drive through the neighborhood you see a lot of people living on the street, abandoned buildings, vacant cars and lots of drugs. I never thought there was that much poverty in Philadelphia until I went on a school trip to volunteer at the St. Francis Inn soup kitchen, during the summer of 2014. Every year my high school takes a group of seven seniors to Philadelphia to help the poor. They told us what the trip was about and show us a documentary of the area but we did not really know what to expect until we got there. While we were driving through the…show more content…
Some people made the food other people wash dishes or hand out the food. My job usually was to handout plastic bags to the people waiting to get food inside. The way the system works is people line up outside in the yard and they wait to be seated inside. In the middle of the yard there are boxes of bread and sometimes fresh fruit and vegetables. My job was to ration the bread out to people who wanted it and give out bags to them to carry the bread in. That gave me the opportunity to talk to some of the people and take an insight to their lives. Nowadays you hear a lot about how homeless and poor people are lazy but a lot of the people I talked too were looking for a job but could not find one or they had like an illness preventing them from getting a job. I talked with a number of people who were ashamed to be getting food. They felt that by getting food they had failed and would be judged by society. That is not right because at one point or another we all needed help to, so it is not right for us to judge
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