It’s the time of the year we are coming up to Christmas, when families meet up once again, presents are given and received, delicious food is served in rather large quantities, and joy and happiness is everywhere...However some people are less fortunate than others, and cannot afford to provide friends and families with presents and food. Therefore St Vincent de Paul have organised for hundreds of Christmas Hampers to be given out to the less fortunate at Christmas time, so they can also enjoy the festive celebrations! St Gerards have a close relationship with the organisation of SVP (St Vincent de Paul) and there is a SVP committee in our school. Every year the fourth and fifth years gather in the sports hall and help fill hundreds of Hampers with lots of food and treats for SVP. In previous years I have heard a lot about the work of SVP and the Hamper Packing done at our school, I was looking forward to helping out with the Hamper Packing and being part of a good cause!
The morning of the 19th of December all the fourth and fifth years walked down to the sports hall to pack the hampers for SVP! We were all divided into groups, and each group had a number of fifth year leaders. As the current fifth years have already done the Hamper Packing last year, they know exactly what to do, so part of their task was to help us fourth years and guide us through the process! It was a great experience working together with the fifth years, and being as efficient as we could possibly be. The jobs were divided evenly within my group, and we filled up the Hampers in no time! I had to search the hall for certain products and then bring the boxes of food to our base. The task of others was to place all the listed products into each Hamper in such a way that we could manage to fit all the products into each Hamper.
It was more challenging than I thought it would be! At the beginning we all just randomly put the listed products into the Hampers, however we soon realized we could not fit everything into the Hampers by doing this. So we had to start again, and this time we took time to carefully place the products into the Hampers, using the available space as best we could! Also at times we would accidently put double the amount of a certain product than needed into a Hamper, and this resulted in us having to check each individual Hamper to ensure they all had equal amounts of products in them! In addition there were certain Hampers that did not include certain products, so everyone had to make sure they put the correct products in their designated Hampers.
The Hampers were filled with a lot more goods than I had anticipated! All the products we placed into the Hampers were donated to SVP from various supermarkets and retailers. The Hampers were filled with many products from sausages and rashers, to jam and tea! After two hours of hard work, all the Hampers were successfully filled and carried to the door to be put into the SVP van and later distributed amongst the people.
I enjoyed working as part of a team with the fifth years, and I have gotten to know some of them better! It was an intense yet very enjoyable two hours packing the Hampers for SVP, and I am glad I was able to help make someone’s Christmas somewhere in Ireland better by filling a Hamper for them! I hope to continue helping St Vincent de Paul with charity work in the near future.