Not your mother's pressure cooker

Today for Community Day we headed east to Aurora to help can peaches to donate to Metro CareRing. (Two of my housemates work at MCR.) When Antonio told us we would be doing this, I envisioned the 6 of us joining a group of older women in a church kitchen with a pressure cooker working away over the stove. I had images of mason jars everywhere, canning rings and a good time.

Boy was I wrong.

We ended up at the Aurora Cannery, owned and operated by the Latter Day Saints and joined 75 other people in an operation that can best be described as a factory. In the main room, there were a whole bunch of conveyor belts, lots of clanging, banging, wooshing and beeping. I spent some time on the "Quality Control" line with about 20 other people. The peaches just kept rolling by as we looked for "things we wouldn't want to see in our can of peaches," including pits, bruises, skins, etc. Even though the peaches went by quickly, the time did not. Fifteen minutes felt like an hour . . . I knew when it was time to leave the QC when I couldn't think of a good reason NOT to eat the peaches. :)

I returned to the "Labeling" room to help make more boxes, manually glue on labels that didn't take through the "labeling machine" or my favorite job, tape girl. Once the cans are rolled through the automatic "labeler", but if they don't stick, then it was my job (for a while) to manually add the glue and stick the label. Once the cans are labeled, they roll through to the "automatic box stacker rack", someone puts a box on the thinger and pulls out a box full of 12 cans of peaches. He then puts the box on the roller and as the tape girl, I would fold in the flaps, tape it shut and pass it on the the "flip and label" person. In the "peach room" had lots of things going on, much of which i did not understand. I do know that there were 3 HUGE pressure cookers (I could barely reach half way around the barrel!) that were going full throttle all morning. The cans were in the labeling room and traveled through a big tunnel thinger into the peach room, down to the "peach packing station" and some how into the pressure cooker. Then onto the labeling room, to the boxes, to the palates. It was an amazing process.

Yes, I realize that none of this makes sense. To summarize, it was a factory! It was fun though! I enjoyed making boxes, taping and getting into the swing of things. It was fun...for a day. Even the fun jobs would get old after awhile. To tape boxes and only boxes all day for days. Yeah, that would get old. Many of our clients in the job services program at DenUM are limited to factory options because of a criminal background. Those with a record can't apply for most jobs that involve people and are left with few options. There are so, so many obstacles to overcoming the hard knocks of life. I've learned so much already and I've only been here a month. I can't even imagine what the rest of the year has in store for me!