On Saturday morning, Sept. 22, while many of their Sweet Briar classmates were eating breakfast or getting some extra shuteye, a group of students was gleaning apples for area food banks as part of the annual Apple Pickin’ Jamboree.
The apples will be distributed through the
Society of St. Andrew, a national non-profit charity headquartered in Big Island, Va. According to the Web site, its volunteers “annually glean over a million pounds of a wide variety of produce in Virginia.”
Sweet Briar Chaplain Adam White and nine others – mostly Sweet Spirits, but also some family members in for the Homecoming festivities – traveled to Johnson’s Orchard in Bedford County.
There, they and other individuals and groups gathered apples that had fallen to the ground or had been left behind by pickers. “It was a great success,” White said. “It was a great time and we picked probably, between all of us, about … sixty gallons worth of apples.”
Judith Bair, director of the Society of St. Andrew, said the apples will go to food banks in Hurley, Bland and Rocky Mount, Va.
White said it was the first time a Sweet Briar group has participated in the Apple Pickin’ Jamboree. “It originated with the Sweet Spirits, with the idea that there is a biblical imperative to help the poor, and in fact all faiths have an imperative to help the poor,” he said.
— By
Suzanne Ramsey,
SBC staff writer
