So this weekend I have been on duty as a Resident Assistant, which hasn’t been too bad.  I originally wasn’t suppose to be working this weekend but I switched with one of my staff members to help them out.   Weekend duty is normally the worst because you go stir-crazy because you can’t leave the building.  Luckily though there was a service event planned through the National Residence Hall Honorary, an organization on campus that I’m the president for, so I got coverage for a couple hours and was able to go.

The service event was in the inner city and all we were told was that we were cleaning up some parks.  There were only about 6 of us that went, but there were a lot of other volunteers there as well, which was awesome.  We actually went to two community gardens, not parks, and we cleaning them up so that people in the neighborhood could plant flowers or gardens in these plots.  They seemed to be dumping grounds currently for a lot of trash and debris, and the garden was overrun with weeds, so our job was to clean it all out and get it ready for the neighborhood.

We unfortunately were only there for a couple of hours, but we really made  an impact on the appearance of the gardens.  The work was backbreaking (being 6 foot and pulling out weeds on the ground for a couple hours do not go hand in hand) but in the end the people seemed extremely happy that we had showed up and helped.  Our Vice President of Service who organized the event is hopefully going to have us go back there next month, which I think would be a great idea.  It was a really good feeling to be working on something that might seem small to many people, but that could have a significant outcome on the attitude and feeling of the community.

Luckily I have today though to recover from the work, stretch my back, and get ready to go back to the grind of school.  Woohoo!