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Date occurred: March 24, 2018
Location: Bryan, Texas
Activity Supervisor: Jack Belcher, #seven one three four four nine three one six six
Description of activities: Weeding, raking leaves, mulching flower beds and softening soil
Christy showing the acorn she pulled
Attending Big Event this year was a bit of adventure getting started but once we got there we had a lot of fun once we got to where we where going.
Lines, lines everywhere
We had a big group of around 15 people from my church so they spread us out into 5 groups, I was a leader of one of the groups and got to stand in the lines and do the paperwork for everything. So we go get tools and all get in the car and as we are 10 minutes out I get a call that the people that I was supposed to help canceled due to them having to go to the hospital so we join groups with another and go to their house. We drive all the way there to discover that they again had canceled Big Event hadn't called us to tell us. So we then move back to another teams place with the combined 3 groups and finally was able to start on working.
I was working with the flower beds at the beginning to weed because I could tell people which plants where the ones to pull and which ones are the ones that where supposed to be in the bed which was really cool. I had quite a few teaching moments where I would show people a plant and they would be like "So that is rosemary". Literal plant blindness where they didn't know what plants where good or bad. Very translational from class.
I didn't get to talk to the owner of the house to know about what it is like for her but I she did like it a lot that we would come out and help her. She had wrist braces and couldn't do most of what we where doing. She was highly appreciative of the mulching her flowers because it was just dirt before and it looked much better after.
We bagged leaves in her yard and being right after winter there was 20 something bags that we had to rake. We handed the rake every so often and with 8 of us raking it didn't take more than a hour to rake it.
After we where done with that we stood around with not much to do so in addition to what we where tasked to do we tried to break up some ground that was dug up from when a water main was fixed but the sod couldn't cover it because it was subsoil so we tried to water it and aerate it to get it to soften up so that the sod would grow back.
Subsoil
Picking up leaves
Afterwards
Most of the work in gardening is the initial prep work, once you are done the upkeep is much smaller and easier than getting started which is really tailored to this kind of one day work. We talked to the owner a bit when we where done and she was of particular note that we where a church group and she had mentioned that she was going to talk to her friends about this which was kind of a "Aha" that we where having a bigger impact than this one person. We where impacting a community of people that we didn't know and will probably never know. The whole event was different to do in BCS because back in Dallas everyone is pretty affluent and older where as down here, we are a bunch of college kids who are just guessing our way through and we are totally unsure of what we are doing but the satisfaction of being able to start and finish something in a day was great. And we had great weather to boot to be in the outdoors.
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