Charleston-Children

3-26-2012

To start off our day, we went to Adaptive Gardens. We were all surprised when the "garden" we were going to turned out to to be a full blown farm complete with donkeys, chickens, and tons of space for plants. We met Mr. Jody who works full time at Adaptive Gardens. He started to explain how much goes on there, and how much it WASN'T just a garden. Almost all of what is grown there either gets sold to higher end restaurants or given to places that use it to simply get fresh, organic food on the table. Also, there's a store on the farm that sells the loofahs that they grow along with homemade soap, the chicken eggs, and other cool stuff. We weren't prepared for the ferocious bug life there and had to use the buddy system and tons of bug spray to make sure that we weren't eaten alive by a variety of mosquitoes, gnats, and our new favorite, fire ants. We met the kids from Georgetown High School who were nothing but fabulous. From the moment they stepped off the bus we could tell how enthusiastic they were about being at the farm and meeting us. It was contagious. We all made quick friends and buddied up to do the daily chores. Essentially, the kids were pros around Adaptive Gardens! They had watering and helping with the chickens down pat. All of them worked with a smile and had us laughing with them every step of the way because of their great personalities. They had such extraordinary attitudes, none of it really seemed like work or chores in the traditional sense. It was such a bummer to leave them, but I know a little bit of their spirit rubbed off on all of us.

For the second half of our day, we went to Chicora Elementary School to help with the WINGS after school program. We were given a rundown of how the program works and told that though the children had plenty of love and excitement to share, we had to be sure that we kept the structure of the program too. Everyone was assigned an individual "nest" that had the boys or girls of a grade, K-5th. We were to help our WINGSLeader as much as we could and discuss and implement the lessons of this weeks topic, trust. We also helped the kids with their homework and had some fun dancing at the end until their parents came to pick them up. It took a little bit for some of them to open up to us, but once they did, you never could have stopped them from showing us their awesome personalities. It was an eye opening experience. Some of us had more lighthearted experiences with the smaller kids and some of us got a little deeper with the older ones. We realized that with high-risk kids like the ones in WINGS, it all boils down to giving the kids all that you've got...just in case they aren't getting it anywhere else.

All in all, the day was excellent. Exhausting! But excellent. We are all tired, but it's the best kind of tired we could imagine on a trip like this. We met some excellent kids today and we're definitely ready to get our hands dirty (literally and metaphorically) with more volunteering tomorrow!