Identify Uchida's purpose for including the details in each of the following passages
From "Desert Exile"
1) "It had rained the day before and the hundreds of people who had trampled on the track had turned it into a miserable mass of slippery mud."
2) "I wrote to my non-Japanese friends in Berkeley, shamelessly asking them to send us food, and they obliged with large cartons of cookies, nut, dried fruit, and jams."
3) "The wonderful news had come like an unexpected gift, but even was as we hugged each other in joy, we didn't quite dare believe it until we actually saw him..."