Volunteering with Concrete Jungle

^{A successful harvest of unwanted fruit by Concrete Jungle (S. on the far right).}

Sonseeray and I joined up with six other volunteers that comprise the Concrete Jungle, an Atlanta-based organization that helps to distribute unused food to the hungry from untapped sources: the hundreds of residential fruit and nut trees growing in the Atlanta area. Most of these trees are untended and ignored, their bounty being consumed wildlife or falling to rot while only miles away many poor and homeless people struggle to include any fresh produce into their diet.

With the property owner’s permission, the group picks the fruits and nuts from area trees, washes and scrubs them, and delivers them to about five different shelters in the Atlanta area. To date this year they have collected and donated about 1,800 pounds of fruits that would have gone to waste. They have collected everything from plums, figs, and blueberries to apples, pears, peaches and wild grapes. There is a huge diversity of luschious and wild fruits growing within the urban confines and locations are just as different. Homes, parking lot medians, behind furniture stores, abandoned lots, local woods. And a lot of these trees are prolific producers.

We met the other volunteers, led by Craig Durkin, on a shady street at 10am Sunday morning. We brought a couple of wicker baskets and a crate, but found their IKEA bags much better suited to the task. We carried a tarp and walked down the street to a house that boasted two pear trees laden with fruit. These were not well tended trees, and their branches were splayed from not being trimmed, and some were broken, they were so heavy with pears. We spread the tarp and picked the lower branches cleaned, then took turns giving the trees a vigorous shaking, which brought down a rain of fruit. We gathered as much as we could from the two trees, which amounted to about 150 pounds of pears. From there we loaded everything into the bed of a pickup truck and drove a short distance to another home where a couple of apple trees were loaded with small, just ready to turn apples. I don’t know the variety, but we picked and shook and gathered about 75 pounds of apples. The home had a pear tree that was sagging with huge fruits, but the owners didn’t want us to pick them. I said we could offer to pick the fruit and let the people have what they wanted, letting us keep the rest, but Craig felt we had enough pears already, and said sometimes event the shelters will turn away too much of one kind of fruit.

One of the young women I met had just returned from India, where she had been volunteering first at an orphanage, then with a program the provided more efficient cooking stoves to rural villagers to decrease the amount of fire-wood they needed to cook with. She said she would be moving on in a couple of weeks to do more volunteer work (I don’t remember where). I hope to see her again and talk with her a little more before she goes. I really admire people who are able to devote a period of time in their lives to helping others, who travel and participate in humanitarian challenges. I don’t really understand how they do it, how they find the courage to let go of so many material comforts and embark of journeys to remote places. I tend to volunteer places that are convenient to me, unless I get really devoted to something. Even then I tend to work it into my life, rather than work my life into it. Anyway, she was a very nice girl and I admire what she is doing. And we had a very nice time participating in this original and noble effort to close the gap between bounty and need.