Day Three!

Another day of small, organizational projects here at Camp Heartland. We started off the morning by unloading a donation of food from Sara Lee, which meant getting bundled up and braving the -2 degree weather (with a windchill in the negative teens!). Next we started prepping the camp facilities for Friday, when 100 local high school freshman (yes, that's 100 thirteen and fourteen year olds!) are coming to do a massive volunteer day as a part of their health class. That involved mopping the entire basement of the camp and then setting up enough tables and chairs.

We then moved on to what we thought would be a pretty simple project - testing out the art supplies in the arts and crafts room, to make sure they all worked (the 100 freshmen are going to be making birthday cards for the campers at one of their volunteer stations). That involved testing around 1000 markers to make sure they still worked, unclogging all the glue bottles and refilling them with glue, sharpening 100's of colored pencils, and then organizing the entire craft room. It wasn't the simple project that we imagined, but it was great, because all ten of us spent the entire morning in one room, joking around as we scribbled with markers and performed surgery to remove clots on glue bottle caps.

After lunch we split up to accomplish a few smaller tasks. Some of us folded laundry, some of us organized the quilts in the basement, some of us spackled dents in the wall from recliners during the summer, and some of us headed outside to load books into a van - One Heartland (the parent organization of Camp Heartland) gets so many donations that they donate what they can't use, which I think shows how interconnected service organizations are. We spent the rest of the afternoon back in the arts and crafts room, making holiday cards to send out to the families of the campers. Again, all of ten of us were in a room, singing to Christmas songs and generally having a really great time. I'm still amazed at how close a group of nine students and one advisor can get so close in such a short amount of time while doing service.

We sat around after dinner and did a short reflection, focusing on what service actually is. Kristen (my co-leader) and I felt that this was important to discuss, because it would be easy to think that sharpening colored pencils and setting up tables doesn't do anything to directly effect the children that come to camp in the summer. However, the fact that we can do this kind of jobs frees up Jill (again, the camp director) to be able to work on paperwork, phone calls, and all the types of things that allow camp to go on in the summer. No one on the trip thought that what we were doing was unimportant, which really speaks to the character of everyone on the trip. We also chatted about what made us decide to go on a Buck-i-Serv trip; I thought it was fantastic that most of our motivation was just because we all like to do service.

Reflection was followed by one of the most intense games of Catchphrase I've ever played, then more movie watching. Day Four (which is actually day) is our day off and our trip to the Mall of America - should be a good time.