As my first Day of Service I didn’t know what to entirely expect. I just had a small idea
that we were going to be doing a lot of volunteering. Some of my assumptions were correct but there where a few surprises as well. As we walked up to resister we had to pick a team, my team color was white. Our first event wasn’t community service but more of a discussion session. There were a few to choose from and I picked Green Dot. We learned about safe places, green dots, and dangerous places, red dots, and how to turn a red dot into a green dot. There was an exercise about a man who picked up his friend from a party. The guy from the party had a severely intoxicated girl with him and she wanted to go to her home. The guy from the party said that no she didn’t that, she wanted to go back to his place and told his friend to drive both of them there. The question and moral of the situation is if he does drive both of them back to the friend’s place and the girl gets raped is it the drivers fault. Overall in was an emotionally heavy experience but very informational one, I believe now it will help me be able to assess situations
better in order to help others stay safe. After that was the best part of the day, meal packaging. The goal for our team was to make over twelve thousand meals for kids in need. There were three stations. The first station was filling a bag with all of the main parts of a meal. The second sections job was to weight the meal to make sure there wasn’t too much or too little. And finally the last station had to seal the bags shut. It was the best part of the day not only because there was music, a chance to be goofy with friends, or the small rush of adrenaline from racing against the clock. It was my favorite part of the day because it felt like my actions were directly going to help someone and improve their quality of life. I liked it so much I joined the last group of the day to do it again. I am looking forward to the next Day of Service and hopefully it will be as fulfilling and fun as my first.
-Krysten Schmidt