Although Bangle says she has volunteered before, she says even the time she spent with migrant farm-workers in California cannot compare with the complete chain of service she witnessed through working for The Food Project.
And she says this week before school has helped her to feel at home in sections of Cambridge and Boston she might otherwise never have seen.
"My view of Cambridge is probably really different [from most first-years]," she said. "I haven't seen any of the rich parts. I've only seen the poor places."
While many of the first-years in the working on The Food Project had never labored on a farm, they found one member of their class well-schooled in manual labor and good old fashioned hard work.
Ethan Thierow '99, a Lincoln resident, spent his second summer at the Food Project working as a crew leader. Upon learning that a group of his classmates would volunteer at the project, he agreed to help lead the group.
Thierow says he has already become fast friends with the FUP group and through them met his Harvard roommate, a fuppie on As he picked, Pedro Pimentel '99, who is from the Dominican Republic, reflected on what he had learned in his FUP experience. "To apply what happens in our classes to what is going on in the real world," he said. "In high school, I felt that it was useless to go to class and study and not do anything for the community." Naiwen D. Tu '99 and her fellow workers remembered a quote Boyd had shared with them from the book, Streets of Hope. "A vision without a task is a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. And a task with a vision can change the world," Benjamin W. Hulse '99 recalled. "This is kind of like a task with a vision," Tu said as she placed a plant into her crate of greens.