Black or rather clean up Friday

Black Friday or the busiest shopping day of the year...

Apparently still draws quite a crowd. These kids must have shopped since Thanksgiving night at 12PM ( which is when most of the stores now open for Black Friday)

Yet, I didn't venture out on a shopping spree but rather went back to beautiful Columbia University in nice sunny weather

Only to spend the entire day inside, cleaning up from the big Thanksgiving dinner the day before in Harlem

2200 meals that were cooked certainly left a lot of pots, trays and cutting boards to be cleaned and most disgustingly a lot of grills to be scrubbed.  I got there at 10.30AM and by the time I left around 6.30PM there were still a few things to be packed and sorted but I was so tired and just needed to sit down for a little while. 

We literally cleaned dishes and things for hours today, a task that seemed almost unsurmountable at times. This amazing girl from the Bronx who apparently volunteers every year in this and works full time in a shelter as a receptionist, taught me some stamina though. When I was ready to give up and ask someone else to step in for me, she was still all energetic and was quite ambitious to really scrape off the last bit of burned stuff from the tray that I was ready to give up on... 

All the left overs (and there were quite some left overs as the kitchen had also donated food for the volunteers and they didn't manage to eat all the fajjitas etc) were transported to some of the surrounding shelters that could make use of the products and had a means of storing them somewhere (a big problem in NY as you can imagine).  However, Thanksgiving is the one time of the year that these shelters actually get a lot of donations so we had to make sure they had capacity for our things before just shipping them over.

I was very moved by another group of volunteers that belongs to an association called Dignity, a gay catholic group who were not allowed to conduct their services in a  catholic church in NYC and thus now has to do them in a protestant one. I couldn't help but ask myself, why, if your church is so discriminatory and clearly does not help you, why on earth would you want to remain part of that organization? Must be because the faith is pretty strong. I learned a fair bit about gays and lesbians in the catholic church and was shocked to hear that the irish parade that we went to for Paddy's day did not let gays march with them. That was the main reason why the catholics in Queens have started their own parade which I'd love to attend next time around...