Day of Caring with the United Way

I spent the whole day, Friday, in south Seattle building a garden with a group of co-workers from various PACCAR divisions for the United Way Foundation. Every year PACCAR conducts a United Way Campaign to generate money and it is a week long fest of games, raffle tickets, bake sales, breakfast carts, silent autctions, and various ways to humiliate management all in the name of donations. They pit the divisions against each other to create a competition and over all it is pretty fun.

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This is the second time I was nominated to be on the United Way Committee and this time for PACCAR Financial. This time, however, I was invited to go along on the Day of Caring and it was great fun. I like helping out with the needy but it isn't usually something that I seek out on my own because it would be yet another project to my extremely long list of "I'd like to do's..." So having someone assign something to me like the "Day of Caring", which also let me out of work for a whole day, was awesome. I was assigned to work on a garden patch for under priviledged called the P-Patch. Linked to the Seattle Housing Association it was to become a garden that allowed the resident refugees and immigrants to have a place to grow food for themselves and for local organic markets. By allowing them to sell their produce it gave them an opportunity to learn how to have a small business and develope their business and networking skills.

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It was great fun. I loaded up the Jimmy with all the garden tools we had and our loyal wheel barrow and made my way through rush hour traffic for Bellevue to pick up my PACCAR Financial counterparts.

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It seemed appropriate to include pictures of the rush hour traffic because it seemed especially slow that morning and it is this traffic that makes me have to take the bus so I don't fall asleep while driving. What is Seattle; The 2nd worst place to drive in the United States due to the driving conditions?

It seemed like it was going to be an over-cast rainy Seattle day but then it burned off and by the time we got down to South Seattle it was sunny and warm enough to take off our jackets and for some of us, change into only T-Shirts.

It was a great bunch of people and we worked our butts off moving 75-100 lb (no kidding) cinder blocks, shoveling clean dirt and mulch, and getting the tiered garden ready for plots.

Some were surprised at how hard and heavy the work was and there is always a group of people that do more talking than working, but for the most part every one had a good time I think and we pretty much finished the garden.

I found it really rewarding and while I am now covered in bruises, my face, arms, and the part in my hair is sunburned, and my arm pits, biceps, lower back, and elbows still ache, I would totally jump at the chance to do it again.