wward1's Travel Journals

wward1

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  • 25 years old
  • From Florida, United States
  • Currently in United States

My Community Service

When I think of community service, I think of something that someone does for the community that not only helps the community but makes the person doing the service feel good. An example of my community service would be in the summer when I coach kids in Jacksonville Universities Upward Bound Softball, Track, and Spades. Upward Bound (UB) is a program for aspiring high school students that want to get ahead and prepare for college. At the end of the summer UB has an Olympic Ceremony were kids from UBs all over Florida meet and do a variety of events, everything from spelling bee’s to billiards to swimming and basketball. This is my favorite part of community service, because not only does the staff tutor the student during the program we get to watch them develop and make friends throughout the 6 week program. These kids aren’t always from the best areas and sometimes aren’t necessarily the most college ready individuals, so it makes me feel good to show them that if I am making it so can they. The Olympic Ceremony is something that is frequently talked about, but teacher and the rest of the staff have the constantly remind them that if they don’t have above a 2.0 in week 5 when grades come out then they cannot participate in the Olympics or the Mr. & Ms. Upward Bound pageant. It is a good feeling when kids that graduate from the program come back and tell how much the staff helped them succeed not only in the classroom, but in life.

Journal 5

Ecuador Guayaquil, Ecuador  |  Mar 23, 2008
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Day five, today we are going to visit Dominga Bocca a girl’s home with abused girls that live at the facilities. This place is kind of nice, but it is a little small with a basement and a second floor. They just need us to paint, so some of us go paint one of the side rooms and others go hang out with the girls. Before we start to paint we wait for the paint to arrive and meet some of the girls. I was meeting some of the girls when one of the teachers asks me if I want to walk to the store with her and one of the girls from the school. We go to a small store at first, then we go to a huge indoor/outdoor market place where the sell everything from peanuts to octopus. This market was pretty unusual, because they had raw meet just sitting out on the counters and some of the meet was really fresh I could tell, because it was still dripping blood on the floor. This market showed me a different side of Ecuador, a side of farmers who sell what ever they can catch. We also got about fifteen pounds of bananas for a dollar. We head back to Dominga Bocca and start painting, a lot of the girls ask if we can dance and say that their going to play music later. We finish painting hang out with the girls they play some music and some people dance. We had a good time though and as we leave we take a million pictures and the girls are sad to see us go. We leave and head back to the hotel and decide to head back over to the outdoor market, where we see all kind of things, pretty much if you can hold it you can sell it is how they feel, because people were selling everything from sock to live crabs. We head back to the hotel and attend our lecture for the night, and go eat at a really nice restaurant and have a four coarse meal and spend a grand total of $18.
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