THOUSAND OAKS : 25 Students Go on Field Trip for Food Bank

Nina Bomar, a junior at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, skipped economics class Thursday to spend the morning in a Camarillo field, picking leftover lettuce.

She joined about 25 other students who volunteered for Food Share, an Oxnard-based food bank that also gleans crops and uses them to feed the hungry.

Bomar said the chance to help Food Share was worth skipping class.

“It’s all going to feed people, so that’s a nice feeling,” Bomar said, slicing a green leafy clump away from the damp earth and flipping it into a plastic bucket.

While the work was hard, being outside amid all that produce had its benefits.

“I love lettuce,” Bomar said. “I just want to have a salad after this.”

The event was also designed to educate students about the lives of farm workers, said organizer Richard Elias, chairman of the Peace and Justice Committee at Cal Lutheran.

One Cal Lutheran student already knew something about that.

Norma Murillo, a sophomore Spanish and art major, said she helped her mother in the Oxnard strawberry fields as a 5-year-old during school vacations.

“I’d get tired really fast, so I’d just sit down and eat the strawberries,” Murillo said.

Thursday, though, Murillo was out in earnest, on a mission to find out for herself what her parents endured.

“It’s so much hard work,” she said.

Acting campus pastor Verlyn Smith also joined the effort, slicing away at the green leaf lettuce with a kitchen knife he brought from home.

“It’s a new experience for me,” Smith said. “My back feels like I’ve done it quite awhile.”

The students mingled with regular Food Share volunteers, mostly retirees.

Wayne Stephens, 73, a retired bank manager who lives in Oxnard, was standing in the back of a truck, dumping buckets of student-collected lettuce into large plastic bins.

With a load of lettuce, he said, he has to drive the truck carefully.

“The police frown on dumping that stuff on the roads,” Stephens said.

“I just stay off the freeways so I don’t have to go very fast and it doesn’t blow off.”

After working in the fields, volunteers went to the Food Share warehouse to pack and sort food for distribution to the poor.