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Downtown Lions work for Food Rescue Express and make some new friends
This story is one of the meeting of two very different cultures with a spirit of service. Lion Andrew Miles provided the following narrative.
Jackson Kellogg came as a guest to the Eugene Downtown Lions Club. His wife is from Central Asia and is active in the Islamic community. Many of the Arabs in Eugene are students and want to contribute to the community and also learn about American culture outside of what they might find on college campuses or in mass media. While at the Abu Bakr Mosque I heard a conversation regarding how they could serve the community so I invited them to lend a hand at the food rescue express particularly since the sign up sheet from the Lions showed that we might be short handed.
I thought that based on human nature if 15 guys say that they will come that a few might actually show up. Instead around 20 people came and loved the experience and left with a positive impression of Lions and American culture. There was a mix of students and business owners from Eugene. The majority of the group are from foreign countries and were unsure about how to best lend a hand. Moktor AlHemyare, owner of a car dealership said, "It's good to learn from the Lions Club as an established, respected group that can teach us how to efficiently serve the community." Ibrahim Hamide, owner of Cafe Sariah said, "This was a great experience, its our duty to feed the hungry and it was a great venue to learn how to best do this within the context of American culture." Many of the students gained a very positive impression of Lionism and asked if there were clubs in their home countries. Khlaid Alfallatah said, "Some have suggested that we do things as a community of Muslims to show people that we are not what some news sources say that we are, but this is not Islamic. Doing things for personal recognition only feeds the ego, even within the context of a group. The more important factor is the act of service itself. We may help people for recognition and God may later punish us for doing it with the wrong intentions, by helping existing service organizations who have more experience we keep the focus on service.” The rest of what I heard was in Arabic.
From Lion Tim Chuey's perspective it's difficult to come up with words that could express those sentiments any better than Lion Andrew and the group members already did. We’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story. There are too many people, both Lions and Muslims, to list all of their names, but it is more important that we are thankful for the opportunity to interact with such gracious people.
Food Rescue Express is an arm of Food For Lane County. For those who don’t already know volunteers from various groups in the area repackage food fro Food Rescue Expres that was donated by local restaurants so that it can be distributed to those in need.
6 March 2011
Tim Chuey
Publicity Chairman
Eugene Downtown Lions Club
Both groups told what work they will be doing.
Lions doing their part in
repackaging the food.
Local Muslims pitch in and also work hard.
Even the youngest helped out.
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