Community Service Part 1

When Sal told our class in the very beginning of the semester that we have to figure out a way to do 10  hours of community service before the end of the semester I felt like it would be really hard to find time to fit it all in and I felt kind of overwhelmed. When Sal said there was an opportunity to go with him and a group of other  students to the St. Thomas soup kitchen downtown and volunteer there for 5 hours I was very excited but also nervous. On our way up to the soup kitchen I felt uneasy about the kind of people that might come there. I have never volunteered at a soup kitchen before and i was somewhat scared to have to be there for 4 hours. When we first arrived, a very nice woman took us to the back of the kitchen where we put our coats down and got our aprons on. After we got ready, the owner of the place sat us all down and went over what we were going to be doing. He said that are 2 basic rules: to be safe and to be kind. He said that this rarely happens, but sometimes people try to steal some food or are just misbehaving, but that we should not deal with that ourselves, instead, let him handle it. We were then assigned jobs- i was in charge of walking around with pitchers of milk and serving it to whoever wantes some aswell as greeting anyone that came in and asking if i could help them with anything. Once we ran out of milk and people started to leave, i was in charge of handing out granola bars, apples, and leftover soup at door and wishing everyone a good night. Over all it was such an amazing experience and i would love to go back there and volunteer more. I think it truly changed my way of thinking about people and how some people are unfortunatly put in a situation where they cannot afford a nice hot meal every day. The people there that influenced me the most and i will never forget was a mother with two of her daughters and they were such sweet little girls and surely did not deserve to have the life that they are living and it made me so happy to be able to at least brighten up their day a little bit with something as small as a glass of chocolate milk.

Race

So this week I learned that race does not exist... As teenagers in America, we have always been taught that your race is an identifier to who you are and where you come from, but that is not necessarily true. your race can change based on your social and cultural environment. We had an activity where Sal lined up 7 balls with distinct characteristics and had us put them in groups based on these characteristics. I divided mine by sports: basketball, baseball, football, and soccer. Easy. As time went on he kept adding more and more balls that didnt always necessarily belong to a certain group I had already established so it was hard to classify them. The lesson learned was that much like we feel about people, we felt that the balls all should be able to somehow be grouped and put with others of its kind, but once more balls (or people) are added it is a much broader spectrum of differences. People all around the world are different. They look, feel, and act different so instead of treating each "race" as an individual, we should all just focus on the important individuals that surround us no matter what society classifies them as.