St. Francis Week II - Challenges

I'm going to do my absolute best to avoid making it sound like I'm complaining about the St. Francis. Allow me to make a brief disclaimer: without a doubt, I love the St. Francis. For some reason, my words have a way of getting twisted and sounding like I'm complaining, when in reality the only reason I notice such small details is because I have such a love for my volunteer sites. With that being said, onward!

It's hard to point out a challenge that is all-encompassing, because the St. Francis provides such an immense variety of services to the St. Johns homeless population. In food services, we have a terribly tiny food pantry that makes me feel just a little claustrophobic every time I'm in it. As far as pros to the food pantry go, though, they are literally overflowing with food. They have an entire wall, floor-to-ceiling, of TEFAP food, as well as almost every other kind of delicious donation you could imagine. They also have an entire wall of food reserved exclusively for the kitchen's use. But the food challenge is really just space: there's not a lot of space for volunteers to move around, there's not a lot of space to store food boxes that are already made up prior to food days (MWF) and then there's no room to store empty boxes for volunteers to fill with food for food days. There's really just no space for pantry food. Again, another bonus is that we have really incredibly large walk in refrigerators and a huuuuuuuge freezer, just like in a school.

Challenges to our shower service right now is that the only type of towels we have are really thin, small, ratty towels. I actually have spent an hour calling local hotels asking for donations, but of course they all use them for rags once they're no longer usable. But we have plenty of soap, shower gel, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash and lotion, which is a complete godsend from what we get at the Neighborhood Center. The bathroom behind the kitchen is where we store them, and we have a floor-to-ceiling shelf plus the crack space between that shelf and the wall FULL of little hotel minis. For the time being, what we really need are towels.

And then for me, the ultimate challenge is my own desire to do everything perfectly. When I worked at the city-wide summer camp in my hometown, our site manager and I had a rough few first weeks until he finally came to me and said I needed to stop being afraid of him. I have that trouble wherever I go, because I want to do the best I can not to get in anyone's way, or make a mess or have my superiors need to backtrack to fix my mistakes. I wonder if anyone else ever feels that way. Our ED here, Renee, has had to come to me a few times about the exact way she likes a message taken, or just other smaller, snide comments about how I do things. I know she probably isn't meaning to cut me down, but I take everything so personally. I really need to just buck up and grow a thick skin, but I always end up with this overwhelming feeling that I'm causing more trouble than I'm helping, and then I get really insecure and apologize in an annoying frequency, which then actually gets her mad at me, and then it's just a downward cycle, haha. It helps for me to keep in mind that I'm here to help the homeless and not to be a secretary, so when I accidentally forget to ask who's calling before I transfer to her I remind myself it's not the end of the world. Aside from those challenges, everything is going pretty smoothly. All of the employees seem to really enjoy having me here, which is great because I'm so overjoyed to be here.