Helping out with OC Transpo Christmas Food Drive for the Ottawa Food Bank - December 8

One of the things we are trying to do more of as a Youth Ministry, is to move out of our regular youth activities and assist in the community more.  One way we decided to do that was to help out with the food drive for the Ottawa Food Bank.  For the Christmas drive they use OC Transpo buses and fill them at various sights in the city.  They then drive them to their depot and volunteers help unload them. 

 On Saturday, December 8th, several of us gathered at the Colonnade OC Transpo site and awaited the start of the unloading.  

We've not done this before and were told to be there at 6:30, but we didn't end up starting until 7:15 pm.  Unfortunate.   

Once we did get started, it was a cool thing to watch.  The Chinese Alliance church does this every year with their youth group and families. OC Transpo charters a bus and picks them up and drops them off.  They had at least 40 people there.  

 The buses line up, loaded with food, and people descend on them like a pack of wolves.  : )  

You can see that the windows swing out from the bus and people would stand on the outside and receive food from people unloading from the inside. 

Wooden sticks were used to hold the window's open.  

Wilma helped out and got right into the swing of things.   

Melanie too.  

Here are Chris H and Amy unloading from the inside of the bus. 

Near the end of unloading a bus.  Sarah and Amy and Simon and Miranda worked hard.   

Chris lending a helping hand.  

 Whatever open space was available was used to unload the food into the bins. 

Yes, I helped out as well.  

Ethan came along and watched us all hard at work.   

Here's Chad waiting for bags of food.   

See, proof I worked.  

No really Chad, I worked..honest... : )  

We unloaded each bus in about 15 minutes.  There were about 15 buses to unload this year.  We unloaded multiple buses at once, so we were done in about 2 hours time.   

Amy and Sarah.   

After we were all done, Chris didn't want to get off the bus.  : ) 

We had a great time working and doing something good for the Ottawa Food Bank.  We hope we can do this again next year, and see some more of our CIA/ETM'rs come out.