Mormon Helping Hands Day

So across the state of California, Mormons had a huge a project called, Helping Hands. It's pretty well known across mormon circles. It's all about helping out in your communities. This is probably why mormons are known for their philanthropy and service. This past month alone we have participated in weekly service projects to better the city of Berkeley. So for the May 8th extravaganza, we cleaned the shoreline of the Berkeley marina/ dumping ground. The story behind this shoreline is that it used to be an industrial dumping ground. After the big SF earthquake, many folks refused to live in homes built of bricks and so they tore down the homes and dumped all the bricks at the shoreline. You can also find pipeline and many other industrial dumping here. It's become kind of a warzone, none people friendly place. However, the worst part of the shoreline is that there is plastic everywhere. This is a dumping ground in all sense, and so all the plastic trash that will never biodegrade ends up here where the animals end up eating it and being poisoned and die. So our job was the find all the plastic floating around the shore or mixed in with the seaweed and get it out so that the animals we all love, don't end up ingesting it. So for a good 4 hours, the stake cleaned the beaches for Helping Hands day. It was fun in all aspect, especially when the Bishop makes it seem like we won a prize every time we dug around and found more trash.

"Ohh, Golly, look at that!"

"Good Job KC, thats a fabulous amount of plastic you got there".

"SJ, over there look! A straw!"

"See that boulder? It was once over here, now its over there, and the Nips bag is now properly disposed of".

Along with coming out for a good cause, KC our coordinator for the ward, motivated all of us to show up by putting a little competition together. Elders Quorum versus Relief Society, whoever has the most people show up will receive a bunch of home baked goods. The sign up list originally consisted of an even amount (give or take) of Elders and Sister, but on Saturday morning at 9am when we all rolled in, KC said we no longer needed to sign in to prove which group had the most people, it was bluntly obvious, with 3 girls and 18 guys, the Elders had won. Relief society apparently is either a group of girls who have commitment issues, or ones who didn't want to wake up before the crack of dawn.

It was also a freezing cold day, we had wind chill of freezing degrees on top of it and most of us (myself) were dressed for a spring-like day.

Boys... they moved rocks and boulders in an attempt to pick up one small chip bag and a straw. We have to give them credit for working though, and showing up.

SJ found a little figurine, she wanted to keep him, but we decided that "one man's trash, another woman's treasure" did not apply during helping hands.

Gar found a happy tooth amongst the trash. She also found a series of bouncy balls that all ended up in KC's pockets by the end of the day, apparently those could not be trashed.

Not sure if bird will ever consume something this big, but it might break down and then many birds will consume it!