As many of you may already know, Stockton recently held it’s 10th annual Day of Service. I, like many others, attended. Being a freshman and not having any sort of idea what was going on made the whole process slightly confusing. I completely forgot that I had pre-registered, so when I walked in the door and saw a huge line of people I was, at the very least, confused. Asking around, only a few people realized that they were in fact standing in line for a reason. When I asked why we were in line, most people just looked at me and shrugged.
After getting my sheet of paper and “signing in,” we were all off to breakfast! Yay breakfast! There was such a lovely array of scrumptious foods that I didn’t really know what to pick. But that’s beside the point. Once breakfast was finished, all of us service people traveled up to the event room and started to find groups which we were interested in devoting our day to. We tried to find groups who were doing things that were fun or high up on our list of okay things to do in life rather than at the top of our hate list.
I decided to work with the Covenant House service group for the day. The description of our activities soon to come included but was certainly not limited to yard work. Once I read the sign in which the description was posted, I cringed slightly inside. Yard work is definitely not something I love to do. So, I was fairly skeptical but I mean really, how much yard work can anybody actually do in Atlantic City? Where is there yard to work on there anyway? So I sat down and waited to start the journey.
After we got to Covenant House, we put all of our stuff down and the woman in charge of volunteer work gave us an overview of what Covenant House stands for and why they do what they do. Basically they take in 18 to 21-year-old men and women who came from a bad place or don’t exactly have the best past and give them the opportunity to become educated and get their lives back on track. Everything is free for the men and women who stay there; all that is asked of these men and women is that they become what they want to become. After she finished giving us this message, she sent us to work.
We went out to the courtyard with shovels, rakes, gloves, mulch, and garbage bags and picked up all of the trash that was lying around and under the bushed and then we laid down mulch to make the area look nicer. Then we weeded the gardens around the perimeter so that there were only flowers and shrubs left. Once we finished that we moved dirt from a flower tier that had started to fall apart into four others to fill the four other tiers and take down the one that was starting to fall apart. After we finished, we ate our lunch and had a reflection session where we talked about what our service means to others and why it’s such a nice thing to do.
We concluded the day with a walk on the boardwalk in search of other service groups in need of assistance. We came across two other groups but they didn’t really need our help. So we drove back to Stockton and that concluded the 10th annual Day of Service at Stockton.