On October 13, an Afternoon of Service was hosted by Commuters on the Go. The event was held in the Campus Center Event Room, and served to fulfill a short-term Honors service requirement. About thirty or so students attended the event, which included a number of small service projects to benefit the less fortunate.

The projects involved in the Afternoon of Service included building teddy bears for children in the hospital, creating small baskets for poor mothers and homemade birthday cards for homeless children. I personally participated in the birthday card activity with a handful of other students from my dorm building. Over the course of the event, a large number of cards were created, many with corny, birthday-related puns decorating the covers, others with a more simple “Happy Birthday” and stickers. The mothers’ baskets station, which made small baskets and cards for Mother’s Day, saw no less creativity. I personally think it was a bit early for a Mother’s Day-themed service project, but it probably came down to the logistics of collecting and distributing the baskets. The final station, which created teddy bears for children in the hospital, was a longer process and as such continued into the reflection session at the end of the event.

The reflection session following the event served to tie together three separate activities that initially have little in common with each other. The actual reflection involved participants writing the most important people, traits and physical objects in their lives, trading with someone else, and throwing away one of the other person’s cards. This served to illustrate the situation of the people this program was designed to help – having lost something dear to them without having had any sort of say in the matter. The reflection was more powerful than I would have initially thought it would have been, and that is to the credit of the organizers of the event.