Today I volunteered to work at the Church Cannery. We were working on canning chili. There were three women and one man from our designated area of town. We all came from different areas, totaling about 15-20 volunteers.
There are many different areas where we could be assigned. For instance, you could put together boxes and place them on the track, watch the cans come through the line and make sure they didn’t catch on anything, look for flaws in the can itself, work the label machine, participate in the boxing of the cans, lifting the filled boxes onto a palate and so on. But my friends and I got the auspicious job of placing 2010 labels on 2009 Peas and Corn boxes.
There were palates upon palates of boxes with the year 2009 on them. Since this is 2010, there needed to be a new label put over the old 2009 on the boxes. The church believes in waste not want not, use it up, repair it, make do. So for about 3 of my 4 hours I put sticky 2010 labels on the old 2009 boxes. We put new labels on nearly 4000 boxes.
Not that I didn’t just love putting 2010 labels over the 2009 on the boxes, but it did become somewhat redundant after 2 hours. I occasionally looked around the room at what others were doing. Roberta was working on the boxes and I saw that frequently she was just standing there. That looked like a pretty good job to me, at least something different anyway. Finally, I went over to Roberta and asked if I could trade with her. This was not something unknown there, trading. I had seen some trading of jobs going on already. Roberta was so wonderful to let me work at her job. She gave me some training and I was off and boxing.
Well, it wasn’t as easy as it looked. I got boxes upside down, and not sealed on the bottom and the line backed up and, and , and. The permanent workers were so nice to me. Apparently Roberta was just so efficient that it looked easy and it looked like she was just standing around. After working on the boxes for probably ½ hour, one of the permanent workers let me trade with Linda and I got to go back to labeling the boxes again.
I had such a good time. The professional folks at the cannery were great. They were informative, inclusive, fun and efficient. There were also missionaries who came. I especially loved watching the missionary sisters run the fork lift. That is a job I’d love. But the best thing about the cannery is knowing that you are helping people all over the world. There is such a need for humanitarian aid now, and it gives me such a good feeling knowing that I’m doing something that will make a difference.
I’ve worked at Church Canneries since I was in my teens. When I was just a new member of the church, I canned tuna in the old San Diego Cannery downtown. We could always tell in San Diego when the tuna fleet was in. You could smell fish all the way to my home in El Cajon, 40 miles away. The old cannery had wood tables the fish would be placed on, for us to cut them up, pull out the bones and other entrails and prepare them for cans. The cans ran down the center between two long wooden tables. We stuffed cleaned up tuna in the cans.
At some point the church built a new tuna cannery in San Diego. My mother was an inspector in that cannery, because of her college education in kitchen procedures. One of the men at this cannery told me that the San Diego Cannery is no longer there. He said the church tore it down. I have such good memories of the volunteer time I had there.
I have worked in church welfare farms and canneries in California, Washington, Arizona and now here in Utah. I remember having helped in canning tuna, corn, beef, jam, soup and now chili. I’ve also helped in the dry pack canning of carrots, rice, oatmeal, milk and so on.
The welfare program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is huge and provides shelter, food, jobs, education and many other services. I’m so happy to be able to help the people of the world in this way. Where else could someone go for a few hours as they can, that would have such far reaching influence?
Here are some links to interesting websites:
Link to the church's provident living site:
Visit the new Latter-day Saint Charities Web site to learn about LDS Church relief efforts in Haiti. To make a donation to worldwide relief efforts.
Haiti Relief Efforts
Go to the Humanitarian Services Emergency Response donation form.
Humanitarian Services Emergency Response
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