Day 60

 Today was pantry day.  We were a little short on help, which was both a blessing and a curse, as some of the annoying volunteers were gone, but they did manage to accomplish some tasks.  Doug and I went and did the pick-ups, and they were not bad, but not great.  Once we had everything put away, we had lunch.  After lunch, we opened up, and boy, was it busy.  It was kind of a frustrating day.  One of the volunteers kept yelling at us, and he wouldn't follow directions, which made the freezers get way too warm because he would leave them open.  Anyway, we also realized how much the government shutdown was going to make the pantry crazy.  A lot of the people who live in our housing rely on social security to buy food, pay rent, etc.  This means that the pantry is going to get extra busy because people are no longer able to afford the food they once could.  We saw a lot of people in the pantry who don't usually come there because they have been put in a tight place.  The number of people was not quite a record high, but it was close.  We had around 50 people through in the first hour, and usually there are around 50 people total.  We are expecting next week to be even busier since people are only getting poorer.  Another problem that will happen is that everybody will start struggling to pay rent because of the loss of government money.  This will mean Greccio will also start to struggle eventually because we can not afford to make people's rent any cheaper, so we are just going to have to kick people out.  I hope something gets figured out before it gets to that point because there's only so much we can help them.  Anyway, we wrapped up at the pantry around 3:15, and we packed up some stuff and took it back to the office.  Christian met me with the car at the office to pick up my box of food since I wasn't able to bring the trailer today.  We stopped at Pike Ride on the way home to try and renew my membership, but we didn't have the paperwork we needed.  When we got home, we unloaded the box of food and ate some supper and snacks.  Then we headed to church for a pumpkin festival, sort of.  The church had rented a bouncy castle obstacle course, and there was a variety of other outdoor games to play.  There were games like ring toss, bag races, face painting, and pumpkin bowling.  I did get an amazing face painting.  After the event at church, we went home and watched an episode of Severance before going to bed.

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