I came to Barstow on January 3, 2009. I had absolutely nothing to my name except a very old, decrepit Motorhome that had seen its better days eons ago. Not knowing anybody in this town, I was advised to go to the local homeless shelter, Desert Manna. I did and they took me in and on my birthday, January 13, 2009, I started to work for them. I was hired to be the second cook, working in the kitchen 4 days a week. My hours were long (4:30 AM to 5:30 PM) and we only got paid $50.00 a week. It wasn’t easy working for Mr. Kitchen. but he did teach me how to cook for more than 50 people a meal. Mr. Kitchen was also the logistics manager and that too was something I had to learn. The computer room was my third job. It was up to me to keep the computers running so our clients could do job searches. Our Director was Ms. Sincerity and her goal was to feed and house as many of the homeless that we could. We held fundraisers and held food drives and solicited donations to support our many projects for the homeless. For the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, we held a food basket give-away for the low income and homeless of Barstow. We also had a free Holiday dinner for everyone. The water company donated about 250 turkeys and we gathered up vegetables, potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy and a dessert to make up the food baskets. That year we gave away five hundred Thanksgiving and Christmas food baskets. Every year we also have a Christmas Party for the low income and homeless kids in and around Barstow. This also takes a lot of advance planning. We start as soon as we can after the New Year to set up the donations of toys for the next Christmas party. That year something went wrong and by Thanksgiving there weren’t any toys yet. Ms. Sincerity put out a memo that all the staff should get the word out that we needed toys. So we did. We had a toy drive but it came on the same day as the toys for tots run so we lost out there. I download