Soup Plant + Fun times
Wednesdays at Gleanings are a half day, the morning of which is spent in the soup plant. Students package soup mix. Each bag of mix feeds roughly 100 people! Our team worked in the plant for about an hour, and in the end packaged more than 100,000 servings of soup.
Haley and Joleen used a heat stamper to mark plastic soup bags with the manufactured and best by dates.
Jonathan, Elijah and Josh scope mix into a funnel system that fills the bag, and KK uses a heat sealer to seal the soup into the bag.
KK, Marleya (from Thousand Oaks), summer staff and Mariah working the heat sealers.
Elizabeth, Jared, Morgan, Makoa and Mariah working a filling station.
Emma spent her time ripping off bags and facing them all the same way so they are easier to fill. Check out the box to her right that she made!
Joey heat sealing a bag.
This flat contains roughly 2000 lbs of soup mix,and will make over 50,000 servings of soup!
Micah, Henna, Morgan, Morgan, Jared
Marleya is making the soup mix. Each ingredient is lined up here with a vacuum hose that measures quantity sucked up. All the ingredients go into a giant drum mixer, are thoroughly mixed and then dumped into the bins that you see in the other pictures.
In addition to packaging soup, some of our team spent time packaging dried oranges for shipping as well.
Victoria, Joey and George filling bags with dried oranges.
Jason Nick and Zoey worked sealing the orange bags.
Joey and George
The soup plant at Gleanings is run by an awesome guy from Latvia named Henrijs. He wanted to be on the blog, so here is is moving soup with the forklift at the soup plant. The first two times we came to Gleanings (2014 and 2016) Henrijs was working in the kitchen. It’s been fun to get to know him over the last several trips!
The second half of Wednesdays is time off - we spent it at the water park!
I think this is the only photo we got at the water park. Because... phones and water don’t actually mix well.
How Josh does the water park… on a chair in the shade!
And back to the base, we watched a beautiful sunset during our team meeting.
Please continue to pray for us! For bodies to stay healthy and hydrated, and for team work as we continue to work short staffed (hence no pictures from today/Thursday - we were all working too hard to bust out a camera!!)
Also pray for our leaders - we’re all going a little crazy!
Josh: “Hold on! I'm milking the Igloo!”
Aly is going bananas!
Josh isn't a huge fan of group hugs. But…they caught him anyway!