It was an early morning once again as we prepared to serve in downtown Atlanta at Open Hand, a nonprofit organization that prepares meals for those in the Atlanta community. Open Hand targets Atlanta citizens that are medically unable to prepare meals for themselves. Open Hand distributes healthy, well-balanced meals to these people at no cost. Half of our group stayed at the facility to package meals while the other half took meals in our van and made door-to-door deliveries. The work at the facility was very fast-paced and challenging, but just as rewarding to know that these meals we were packaging would help those in need who are unable to prepare meals of their own. The van team had a fun day driving throughout Atlanta making deliveries.
After a long day of service we came back to our house for a couple hours, which we took full advantage of to catch up on some much needed rest before heading out to our next project. La Amistad is an after-school program that is catered toward Latino school children in the Atlanta community. These kids come to this program after school not only to have a good educational experience, but because a majority of their parents work long hours or multiple jobs and don't have the ability to pick their children directly up from school in the middle of the afternoon every weekday. What we were doing is working with the full-time volunteers in each of their respective classrooms. The students come to class, work on homework, and play educational games. The classes were separated by grade, all the way from 1st to 8th. Most of us worked with the younger students, while the rest of us were in the middle school age classrooms to help the students with any questions they might have trouble on. We found teaching both fun and challenging but overall we all agree that it was a great experience and working with the kids was a rewarding and memorable experience.
We did the same thing on Thursday, working with Open Hand during the day and La Amistad in the afternoon. We were down 3 members this round though because one of our group, Foster sustained an infection on his arm Monday while gardening and after a couple days it kept getting worse. We decided it would be best to get it looked at so Tia and Hassan escorted Foster to the local Urgent Care. Luckily it was nothing serious, the doctor suspected it was a poison ivy infection and prescribed steroids to get rid of the infection. At the time of writing this, we can say that the infection has almost completely cleared up!
We came home, made pancakes (yum), and played outside on the house's basketball hoop. After dinner we cleaned up, played an intense game of spoons, and planned Friday's activities. It was a long two days, and I an safely say that no one had trouble getting to sleep tonight!
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