Utah Food Bank

We made it to Salt Lake City! The drive was equally beautiful and stiflingly boring. After we passed through Reno on I-80 we drove through 8 hours of painfully straight roads through barren valleys with low shrubs surrounded by wave after wave of mountains stopped with snow. There were a few especially pretty valleys - one called Independence Valley stretches out almost as far as you can see to either side of the road, and the sunlight coming through the clouds and lighting up the jagged mountains dotted with snow was great to see. We stopped in Wendover, UT which is right at the border with Nevada and at the very western end of the Bonneville Salt Flats. We stayed at a charming little Days Inn (it would have been even better if the pool hadn't been drained) and set out in the morning to get to Salt Lake City. The Salt Flats are incredibly flat and somewhat ominous, but the morning sunlight on the mountains on either side made it worth it. Through a few more mountains along the southern side of the Salt Lake and we were into the basin, through the city, and arrived at Camp Kostopulous.

The camp is located in Emigrant Canyon, which is the pass through which Brigham Young passed with the first group of Latter-Day Saints that entered the Salt Lake Valley. The camp itself covers 25 acres and serves adults, teens and children older than 7 with mental and/or physical disabilities. They do all kinds of programs, including week-long camps, weekly nights out, and adventure vacations to national parks in Utah. Their clientele includes people that have been going to the camps for years. They have some amazing facilities that include several high ropes courses, horse stables (including an indoor arena being constructed), several staff cabins and a recreation area. Also, because it's a camp for people with disabilities, the shower stalls are enormous! Actually, after showering at the park in LA, just having shower stalls seems like a luxury.

On our first day in town we went downtown to see some of the sites around the city center. We started out at the Utah State Capitol Building and went on a self-guided tour (which ended up being me reading off the brochure to the team because I was leading the activities for the day). The building actually looks quite a bit like the national capitol in D.C. but is not quite as big. One of the coolest things about the building was that they have beehives symbols and sculptures almost everywhere. After the capitol building we walked down State street to Temple Square.

Temple Square is the center of Salt Lake City, and all of the street names include numbers that indicate how many blocks they are from the Temple. We took a tour of the Tabernacle and both visitors’ centers with two very attractive female missionaries and then went over to the Conference Center across the street. The Tabernacle, which was built in the 1860s, was an architectural feat when it was built and is shaped like a 3D ellipse, allowing sound to be concentrated from the pulpit to a point in the audience. The Tabernacle seats 2,100 people and housed the annual conference of the church until 2000, when the Conference Center was completed. The CC seats 21,000 and has a 7,000 pipe organ along with the largest permanent theatrical lighting display in North America.

Next we went back to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building where we watched the 68-minute film Joseph Smith: The Prophet of Restoration. The film clearly embellished the life of Joseph Smith and the details of the early church a bit, but it was a powerful representation of the religion's founding prophet and their reverence for him. Afterwards we ate at the restaurant in the Lions House, which was where Brigham Young's wives and children lived and which serves delicious bread rolls.

This morning we had our first day of PT which, because it was about 25 degrees outside, was indoors with all of the furniture in our little cabin pushed to the walls and the tables put in our rooms. Our cabin, by the way, is up on a hill above the road and has a living room with a TV, refrigerator and microwave as well as two bedrooms with bunk beds. After PT we walked down the icy hill to the showers, back up to the cabin for breakfast, and then down to the vans to head off the work. It's so nice seeing snow on the ground in the mornings and feeling how cold and crisp the mountain air is.

At the Utah Food Bank we were split into two groups: one to help inventory the food products stored there for an annual audit and one to work with VITA. VITA stands for Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, which provides tax counseling and helps low income people to fill out their tax forms. Our job is to take phone calls and schedule appointments at sites throughout the state of Utah. It's been a little challenging figuring out where to refer people to because, as you may know, I've never lived in Utah. We have a pretty useful database and some cheat sheets that help out, but it's still a lot of dead time on the line while we're trying to figure out where the heck zip code 84121 is on the state map. So far, so good. Oh, and the food bank provides dinners and lunches for us, which today included barbeque chicken, mashed potatoes, vegetables and canned peaches. So tasty!

We've got some fun things, or at least ideas for fun things, going for the next 2 weeks. I'm running a 10K this Saturday (we'll see how the thinner air treats me) and we're looking into hiking in the Wasatch National Forest and at the Antelope Island State Park, which is right outside of the city in the Great Salt Lake. Utah is a beautiful state, and living so close to such large mountains is exciting for me. I'm hoping that we can take advantage of being so close to so much natural beauty and that we can learn more about the people and community in which we're living.