Tuesday, Feb. 28
Alternative breaks give students an opportunity to volunteer over the spring break week and the College offers the opportunity to faculty and staff to serve in the advisor capacity. These trips are student-led, student-organized (with some help from Discovering Vocation's Sally Schiede!) and the experience so far has led me to realize more than ever how truly amazing Alma College is because of these students.
We arrived in Jacksonville via plane on Saturday evening, rented a van and drove to the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Jacksonville - myself and 10 Alma College students - to work with Urban Mission Experience. While this is not a faith-based trip, it is organized through Jacksonville's First Presbyterian Church.
We met with our host, Dave, upon arrival and he asked for four volunteers to work at the Salvation Army men's shelter the following evening. When the temperature drops below 40 degrees at night, they open the shelter for men only and give them mats and blankets to sleep and hot coffee and donuts in the morning before they leave at 7 a.m. Myself, Lauren Van Over, Nick Nicholas and Matt Sheick volunteered to pull the all-nighter.
What an eye-opening experience...there were 70 men who came to the shelter that evening and were so thankful to us for being there. I don't know why it felt odd to be thanked for that. I almost wanted to thank them for coming, for letting us give them a roof over their head, something to put in their stomachs, for having enough pride to accept our offer of help. We successfully pulled the all-nighter and returned to sleep for a few brief hours before I woke up to drive the remaining seven to "Dignity-U-Wear". I returned to sleep for another two hours before we met up with the rest of our group to help them in the afternoon at Dignity...
You should be SO proud of your College and the students that represent you! I know that I was so proud of the 10 students on this trip - always, but especially yesterday. They represented us all so well. With a full shipment just in of clothes that need to be taken out of their packaging, the retail price tag taken off and then re-boxed according to size, we managed to get through an entire shipment! The man who was coordinating everything at Dignity, Keith, was going to send us on our way at 3:30, when the students mentioned that they - get this - wanted to finish the shipment, that he had said they had until 4:15 and they would get it done by then. They would not leave until they finished, didn't care what time was on the clock. He did not believe them. There was nearly an entire pallette of boxes to be opened, unwrapped, de-tagged and re-boxed. He laughed at them. And that's when the talking stopped, when the group singing stopped. Determination set in. And as a team, we did it, with two minutes to spare and time to clean up. There were not enough boxes to re-box everything, but we unloaded that pallette, which worked out to approximately one box every two minutes. You can not imagine how proud I was sitting there, seeing that service in action. When I heard Keith state, "I have never met any people like you,"
Today the students are working with a senior community and I will re-jointhem to serve lunch to the seniors at noon.
Posted: Mon, March 13th, 2006 at 11:01AM
