The Bread Run

JUNE 9, 2010

There’s a bakery in town named Brumby’s. Its motto is, “Baked Today.” So at the end of each day, rather than just throw out what wasn’t purchased, they let different charitable groups come in and take the bread. Wednesday is our day. There we were at 4 pm with 3 huge heavy plastic shopping bags at Brumby’s. There was a really nice woman from the Red Cross there with a shopping basket. The Red Cross serves a breakfast every morning to the kids at the elementary school. So she got to go in first and take all the sliced bread, then we went in and took about 30 or more loaves of all kinds of bread: sourdough, white, wheat, multigrain, Turkish, French, baguettes. Then we filled another bag with rolls of every kind you could imagine plus croissants and bagels. They also had some pre-bagged rolls of some types. None of the bread was in bags. We came home and took out a couple of loaves of bread for us plus the croissants. Then we took off to deliver bread to some of the members who need help. Since we are brand new in town and haven’t met the members and didn’t know where they lived, it was a pretty slow process. Sister Robinson, the branch president’s wife, had given us a list of about 12 families we should try to see. It was kind of fun. We met a couple of ladies we hadn’t met before. Then it started getting dark, and we still had half the bread left. We had only gone to about half the names on the list. Since it’s a bear hunting for addresses and finding streets that you have no clue where they are, we headed to a small beach area we had driven past earlier in the day. There had been several vans there that looked like they might be camping. We found a group of 3 vans filled with young adult age kids from France. They were thrilled to get free bread. One girl, who turned out to be German and had somehow hooked up with the group, came up to me and said, “After 7 months in Australia, this is the nicest thing anybody has every done.” We told her we were with the Mormons and were happy to help. We drove to another area but didn’t see anymore folks to donate to, so we came home. We still have a bunch of bread. We’ll probably go back to the park in the morning where the transient aborigines hang out and give them the rest before we leave for Port Hedland.
Note of interest: The reason we were picking up the bread at 4 is because all shops in the shopping centers close by 5 pm. I guess the baker closes at 4 so he can be home by 5 also. Only entertainment venues and restaurants stay open past 5 pm. It’s really kind of a good thing because all the workers get to spend the evening with their families or at the soccer fields.