We had a great last day at Urban Promise! Urban Promise is an interconnected network of schools that provide better opportunities for children in living in the city of Camden. Today we went and volunteered at Urban Promise, a school in Pennsauken, NJ.
Cole, Jared, Matthew W, Janiel, East, Shabd, and Lucas were all collaborating with Ian today, the Volunteer Coordinator at Camden’s Promise. Together they cleared out, vacuumed, and sanitized a small room full of items in order to make space for new items that were yet to come. They also cleaned tables inside and explored the huge basement area underneath the school. At the start, everyone was together, but they split up at the middle, taking on outdoors activities.
Jared, Matthew W, Cole, and Shabd all took on the responsibility of unloading a truck full of salt bags, a desk, and a futon, while East, Lucas, and Janiel were working hard picking up trash near the basketball courts. After all this was taken care of, Shabd, Matthew W, and Jared all went back indoors to reorganize shelves while Cole, Janiel, East, and Lucas went to sort through the dumpster, picking out things that didn’t belong there and putting them where they belonged. Overall, Ian’s team moved chairs, tables, desks, drawers, bedframe and mattress, shelves, picked up and organized trash, and sanitized.
During our time outside, some of us were cutting bamboo. This was to clear up the backyard area to make space for a greenhouse. We organized the cut bamboo in garbage bags and disposed of them. The work was hard, but it was worth it in the end! The area that was full of bamboo was cleared out completely, leaving it clean and ready for the greenhouse and garden. Below is a before picture, and then an after.
The third and final group, consisting of Ali, Ava, Caitlyn, Charlotte, and Katherine, were sent to lay down the floor of the greenhouse with a group of students from Ohio. We picked up concrete slabs and placed them across the pre-set dark gray gravel floor. Some were cracked, and they had to be moved into a corner of broken tiles. After placing the tiles on the ground, we had to use wooden planks to evenly space each slab, ensuring a uniform look across the floor. Unfortunately, there was some miscommunication between us and the Ohio contingency, and the occasional slab ended up rather crooked.
We then had to dump and distribute lighter gray gravel in between the (somewhat) evenly spaced cracks, using the gravel as grout. We ran out of gravel and had to make do with what we had, leaving some extra uneven spaces in between slabs.
After, the group took up their shovels and broke down a massive pile of dirt, mulch, and rocks, to prepare it for transportation on a wheelbarrow. Regrettably, the wheelbarrow was bowled over by an accidental student shove, spilling the dirt back onto the soil, this time on the dense wet grass — a surface ten times harder to shovel off of without getting stuck in the ground.
After two wheelbarrow trips, the group was more than a little ready to take a break — thankfully lunch was right around the corner. It’s important to note that today was a little rainy, and the expectation was to serve mostly indoors today, leading to more than a few ruined shoes, outfits, etc.
Lunch was quick, and then the Ohio students and all of us played a fun bonding game for a few minutes, led by one of the friendliest adults at Urban Promise, Garland. We all got in a circle, and one person was in the middle. Some person was selected from the circle to be the “leader” — the person everyone else in the circle copied action-for-action. The student in the middle would try to determine who the “leader” was, and upon doing so the leader would then have to take the middle position in the circle.
After lunch, we headed back outside and the group split in two — Ava and Katherine went back to the shovels, while Ali, Caitlyn, and Charlotte worked on proportionally dealing out the gravel grout, occasionally intermingling with the Ohio students along the way. The dirt was sent over to what Urban Promise aimed to turn into a future garden, while extra gravel — wet, dirty, and full of leaves — was taken off Mother Nature’s earth to get carried over onto the new, greenhouse floor.
Each of us also took some assortment of trash (not garbage trash as in plant waste), bricks, bamboo, or tree branches — some would argue branches is a misleading term for the behemoth limbs of wood — and carried them down the block into the trash center, getting fairly dirty along the way. That seemed to be a theme — student Charlotte Nesevich repeated a statement made by a variety of students across the MFS groups — “I’m going to take the longest shower after this.”
