Shutter Island aka Long Island Adventures (days 3 & 4)

We officially started our week of service on Monday. We packed into our wonderful vans and made the trek over to Long Island, which is ten minutes outside of Boston. We were faced with gale-force winds and drenching rain, which made it nearly impossible to get any work done outside. The Long Island farm is a very holistic operation; it incorporates the issues of hunger and homelessness and provides job training and urban farming as solutions.

On Monday we did anything we could to help indoors: folding laundry, scrubbing cafeteria chairs, and planting seedlings that would grow under florescent light bulbs. Even those these don't all sound like exciting or super-important jobs, we were humbled to see that even the little tasks can make a huge difference.

However, TUESDAY was awesome, because it was the first sunny day of the trip :-) We were all in bright spirits, and we even got to sleep in a little bit later than normal! Tuesday we worked outside on the farm. We were doing farm preparation work, which was fairly tough physical labor. We moved wheelbarrows of compost from place to place, cleaned up junk, spread nutrients and seeds, and turned a hilly greenhouse surface into a (mostly) flat slope.

Interacting with the land and getting our hands dirty was seriously amazing. I truly believe that if our society put down our technological devices for a day and felt some soil or smelled some salty breeze from the ocean, we would more carefully consider the impact we're having on our environment. The ground was VERY muddy, and we were all so dirty by the end of the day. But nobody judged one another; we were okay leaving our superficial ways behind and accepting one another and bonding as a community through physical labor.

We also met some beautiful people at the farm. We met passionate people who revolved their lives around their work at the Long Island Farm. They work long hours each day, all for the sake of providing food for people who suffer at the hands of misfortune and our unjust food system. Much of the time, produce is inaccessible to lower income areas; however, hundreds if not thousands of homeless people are fed by the work on this garden. My heart was so full of wonder and respect for people who choose such lives of service.

Love, Whitney B.