And the service begins…
We began the day at the Carolina Youth Development Center (CYDC), which is a residential foster home for children in the Charleston area. When we first arrived — promptly at 7:55 as we were told, thank you — we heard a little about the history of the organization as well as received a tour of the facility. The cool thing about CYDC is that it isn't just a center, it's a campus. There are several residential buildings as well as an academic house (including a kitchen/dining area) and recreation facility with Nintendos and such. And we can't forget to mention the trees. South Carolina (at least the Charleston area) has some pretty awesomely huge trees. Luckily the weather today was a bit more permitting to be outside with lots of sunshine and a mid-50s temperature that we'll definitely take instead of the foot of snow that dumped on Columbia yesterday, and we're excited because the forecast is predicting the temperatures to go up continuously until the end of our trip.
Unfortunately we didn't get to work with kids at CYDC, but we split into groups to divide and conquer: one group to shred a bunch of their unnecessary files and one group to sort through a room full of holiday decorations. Let us tell you, the paper shredding was not nearly as eventful as the holiday room. In sorting through the seven unused Christmas trees and terrifyingly ugly witch figurines, we found a dead bird. No, not one of those decorative fake ones, a real bird. It was nasty. But not as nasty as the dead mouse that followed. Okay, this sounds disgusting, but that was by far one of the funniest experiences some of us have had on this trip so far.
Following CYDC, we went down the road to North Charleston Elementary School, where we worked our first day with an after-school program called WINGS for Kids, which is devoted to helping develop social and emotional skills with at-risk children. We were each assigned a certain "nest" to join that had a certain age group associated with it, then throughout the day we helped the "WINGS Leader" with various activities scheduled throughout the 2 ½-hour period, including group discussions, outdoor free time and academic time. Some of us were actually challenged a bit ourselves during the homework help session; sorry our brains are on spring break!
Some of us had quite the experiences bonding with our kiddos — Joe bonded with a 5th grader over snapbacks, Kelsey was taught how to step by some 4th graders and a few of us even had the unexpected opportunity to Wobble and Wop with a group of kids…a 1st grader showed us up y'all!
Let's just say it was a tiring first day, but overall we are really excited to be helping at CYDC again tomorrow and WINGS all week.
Can we just say we have the best cooks in all of ASB right here on the Charleston 2 trip? Last night we had some awesome stir fry and tonight we had a classic Kindergarten dinner complete with homemade mac-n-cheese (NOT Kraft, you lazy bums), chicken nuggets and Flavor Ice to really bring back those elementary memories.
Explaining the funny moments of our trip is probably too much of a you-had-to-be-there ordeal, but after hanging out with each other for almost 72 hours straight now, we have come to the conclusion that we don't think the group dynamic in Charleston (group 2) could be any better. We're all loving life here and couldn't be happier to be stuck with each other for this week full of laughing, learning and living the ASB lyfe.
The sun will come out (again) tomorrow,
Sweet Carolina
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