On September 6th, I attended the Day of Service funded by the Office of Student Development. The Day of Service takes place once per semester. When I went to the event in the morning I decided I wanted to volunteer at the South Jersey Horse Farm. The farm takes in abused and neglected horses and nurses them back to health. When I got to the farm after the twenty-minute bus ride, I was surprised at the amount of horses that were there: about a dozen or so. They looked like they had been at the farm for a long time because they all looked healthy. The woman who was in charge was named Ellen and she was a very nice lady with a huge passion for horses.
The first thing I had to do at the farm was a move a tent to another paddock so the horses would have something to rest in. It wasn’t a hard task. The tent was somewhat light and then all we had to do was anchor it to the ground with pegs. The next thing I did was replace the plastic holders for the electric fence. I thought it would be difficult but I only had to change the broken ones and another girl helped me so it was not bad.
Afterwards, I got to spend some with the horses. They were very approachable and I got to feed them the apple cores I had leftover from the lunch they gave us. I also talked with Ellen for a bit and I asked her some questions about the farm. She told me that she had dedicated her life to this farm and wants to be able to get all the horses adopted into good homes. After I was done talking with her, we had to go back to Stockton. We all said good-bye to Ellen and the other volunteers and got on the bus. As we rode back, I smiled to myself thinking of how we all made a difference that day for the horses.