Make a Difference Day and Project Reveal

This past Saturday was Make a Difference Day, with many service projects taking place in Community Gardens all over the city. Every NCCC team headed out to different locations to lend a helping hand (similar to Trinity’s annual Do It Day). My team started the day at Luther Burbank High School. The school had a great garden program years ago until the teacher who had been running it retired and the program disintegrated. Now they are starting the garden up again. This Saturday was their kick off event. We helped out by building raised flowerbeds and got to work on our great new construction skills. By the end of the morning we had something tangible to show for our time, which was a very satisfying feeling. We also got to meet some very enthusiastic and dedicated students who had all come out to work on the garden as well. The other NCCC team worked more with the kids than we did, but it was clear that the garden had a lot of student support.

At lunchtime we had a bit of a picnic and then came back over to the garden area just in time to see Dr. Oz arrive at the work site and do a press conference with the kids. It was rather unexpected and slightly hilarious to see Dr. Oz walk by.

For the afternoon we went off to a different site. This time we were at a community garden in a neighborhood close to our campus. Part of the garden was well cared for, but the rest needed a lot of work. We grabbed shovels and rakes and started marking out new plots. The soil was hard and rocky and this was hard work. As other teams finished at their various worksites, many others came to work with us as well. The garden was crawling with corps members by the end of the day. It was raining and cold, but overall a satisfying day of outdoor work. It was great to finally get some work done!

Saturday night we went out to dinner as a team. After dinner there was one more stop to make. Abby drove us to a Barnes and Noble. She gave us 15 minutes and told us to go to the children’s section and pick out of favorite childhood storybook. It took some serious searching, but I finally found my favorite: Corduroy. I had also picked up Runaway Bunny and an American Girl book. We all went around sharing our books and explaining why we picked it and then it was time for the big reveal! Abby had taken us there to learn of our first project. We will be working in an Elementary School in Sacramento, in the area where we are currently and will continue to be living in. We will each shadow a classroom teacher during the day, acting as a classroom assistant. We will also each have a specialty class and then as a team we will be running the after school program at the school. It will be challenging and exhausting work, but I am very excited to be working with kids! And these kids definitely need our help. The kids come from rough backgrounds. Abby told us some statistics about the student body. There is a 44% drop out rate in elementary school and 93% of the students live at or below the poverty line. We start working there November 4^th and will be there through December 14^th. I am both nervous and very excited to get started!