Friday 15th July - Morning - Wesley Mission $5 Food Challenge

A good night's sleep, a yummy smorgasboard breakfast of bacon, eggs, cereals, pancakes and more awaited those youth who got up early enough, before everybody piled onto the bus for the 8:30 departure into the Sydney CBD.

We were surprised to have Jewel waking up at 6AM to declare that she was hungry. After a bit of observation, she appeared fine. We were all scheduled to arrive at the Wesley Mission by 10AM for our first activity of the day, however the Sydney traffic was surprisingly good, and the bus arrived with more than an hour to spare. Consequently, the youth went down to park underneath the Harbour Bridge near the Rocks. Again, this is second hand information from the Youth. Our family drove in separately, to maximise the room on the bus for the youth and leaders.

At 10AM, we assembled at the Wesley Mission, and we were met by Colonel Sanders. The Colonel didn't try to sell us any Kentucky Fried Chicken, but instead claimed to be called Glenn, and would be taking us through our activity at the Mission. He was assisted by the lovely Lan.

The first part of the activity involved learning about the Wesley Mission and the services they provide by looking through the displays along the entrance walls of the building and answering a quiz. This activity involved many youth racing around trying to get answers - some working together, some copying to get their answers.

We then all headed down into their conference room, where we went through the quiz answers. Following this, they explained about the situations that most of the homeless were in. Many did actually have access to some money (usually government benefits) - the real problem with most of the homeless related to not having a support network of friends/family and so on to be able to help to assist them - they don't know how to get out of the problems they have, and they don't know how or who to turn to for help. They showed us a short movie with interviews of some of the homeless around Sydney and the squats they they were living in.

Glenn stressed to the Youth that they should be thankful for having parents that care about them, and that through Church, they have church leaders and youth leaders who care about them. They have a support network of people who love them. He wanted them to appreciate this and learn how valuable this love was, as they worked everyday with people who missed and needed the very things that the youth have.

It was then time to participate in the $5 challenge. Each of the youth had brought $5 - we were to go out to one of the local supermarkets and to buy 3 days worth of food with that $5. They explained the type of foods that weren't any good (breads, junk foods, chocolates, bulk foods) as they would go off, attract rodents or cause other problems and so on.

We split up into 5 groups of 8-9 youth and 2 leaders each, and headed off to either the nearby Coles or Woolworths stores. Generally our groups did pretty well. There were lots of noodles and cheap tinned food. We did have some debates with the youth - one young man wanted to buy 5 packets of chocolate cake mix - he loves cake mix :) We had to point out that it wasn't really feasible for the homeless to be living off uncooked cake mixture. :)  We were given an hour to do the shopping, and everybody was back with 15 minutes to spare. The Mission had a bunch of milk creates out the front, and on our return, we put in the food we had bought into the crates. We ended up with 14 crates worth of food, all of which was donated to the mission to use for feeding the homeless.

Glen advised that some of this food would be out that night, and all of it would have been distributed within 6-8 weeks. They checked the food and almost everything was appropriate, with only a couple of items that wouldn't be good - he did have a laugh , admitting that this was the first group to ever bring back a packet of bubblegum as  a part of the challenge. He did compliment the youth as well, saying that this was a large group, and normally groups that were smaller than this even had issues getting back in time from the shopping, yet we had done it with time to spare, and with high success rate of appropriate groceries.

Glen wrapped up with another short video featuring people that Wesley Mission have helped turn their lives around, before thanking us and reminding us again of the blessed lives that we have, by having people that care for us. We wrapped up, ate our lunch and got ready for the next activity. As we ate, a number of the youth commented that they had learnt a lot from the presentation and enjoyed the activity.