Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day of Service has finally come and gone! Yesterday was spent in several different places doing several different projects. Kaitlyn and I really had a good time!
We started off our day at the Animal Friends Humane Society in Hamilton. We would have had to take a two-hour long orientation in order to actually interact with any homeless puppies and kittens, so Kaitlyn and I were assigned to laundry and dishes duty for the first hour and a half of our day of service.
Because Kaitlyn and I were planning to attend the Martin Luther King Jr. march at 10:00, we were only able to do one load of laundry. The laundry room was an absolute wreck of towels, blankets, mop heads and chew toys. Fortunately, we found a box of latex gloves before we had to handle the pile of hairy, chewed-up, poopy towels. See said mess below:
When we had done all we could do in the laundry room, we were sent to another room to wash dishes. This part wasn't so bad. I rinsed out all the animals' water dishes and food bowls, Kaitlyn put them in the dishwasher and loaded and unloaded as needed. It only took us one round of dishes to come up with a good system. We do work well together.
We left the animal shelter at about 9:30, as we weren't exactly sure how to get to the beginning of the march or whether there would be plenty of places to park. But with the help of my trusty GPS, we found the Booker T. Washington community center rather easily, and ended up waiting around for more than an hour for the march to start. Were we crazy to think that "The march starts at 10:00" really means 10:00? We didn't leave the community center until 11:00.
Still, the march was pretty cool, in every definition of the word. My legs were about to fall off, they were so freezing. We walked about 2.5 miles, so we got our exercise in for the day. Check out all the marchers preparing for the journey:
It was a little after noon by the time we got back to Dexter (my car), so we went to lunch. We had been talking to a guy from Walgreens for about a week about getting some kind of donation for the Battered Women's Shelter, so Kaitlyn gave him one last call at this point and *yay!* another success! After lunch we went down the street to Walgreens and were presented with a $20 gift card to spend. We bought some hair care things and body lotions and added them to the growing collection of toiletries, office supplies, diapers, and other donations we had solicited.
Continuing our adventure, we drove out to the Atrium medical center in Middletown to visit our VISTA leader, Martha Rose, who was in a car accident over the weekend and has to have surgery on her back. We brought her some flowers, but we weren't able to go in and see her. Fortunately, her mom was in the waiting room and we left them with her. We hope she gets well soon, but we know she's in good hands. Check out that hospital--it's like a hotel.
The last few hours of our day were spent with the long-awaited Battered Women's Shelter project! About ten volunteers met at a woman named Barb's house to put our donations into paper bags for the shelter. It took a few minutes to figure out the best way to do things ("Should we all go around with one bag and just go to town?" "Maybe we should each just have a station." "Do they want different things in each bag or should all the shampoos be together?") But we soon developed yet another system and finished up in no time. It was a really cool organization; everyone was really friendly and made Kaitlyn and me feel more than welcome.
So all in all, it was an incredibly busy, exhausting day, but it was also a lot of fun. One day can hold a lot of great experiences!
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