On Saturday, we had a workday. We'd had one before and I'd spent most of the day stocking shelves in a low-income grocery store. It had been a good experience and I was looking forward to our assignments for the day.
Except, there weren't any. They loaded us up in the vans, handed us garbage bags and a set of directions to get back to base and told us to go do service. Then they dropped us off in various neighborhoods in the town of Apopka.
In the neighborhood where my group was dropped off, no one spoke English except for the kids. Luckily, I had some Spanish under my belt. So wandered around and asked various people if they needed any help with yard work or washing their cars or whatever. No one had any work for us and most said thank you with very confused looks on their faces.
When we got back to camp, I used my Spanish-English dictionary to figure out what I had said. Turns out it went a little something like this:
"Hello, sir. Do ya speak English? My Spanish is bad. I speak tiny. We are in a voluntary program. No bosses says 'look, to do to work. For nothing money.' Do you have to work for we?"
Eventually, we wandered into an English speaking neighborhood of senior citizens. No one there wanted any help either. Finally, we met a man named Mr. Young who offered to let us rake his leaves. We finished up our work and were eating lunch when the head of the home-owner's association came and told us we had to leave. Mr. Young came out and argued with her and we got permission to rake two more yards.
We wandered out of that community and started heading to base, picking up litter along the way. We found an abandoned shopping cart and used they as a sort of rolling dumpster. One inquisitive little boy we met was fascinated by our cart. He kept running around finding garbage for us to put in it. So we would have even more garbage in our cart, he even unwrapped an old half eaten burrito and stuck it bean side down into my hand, separate from the wrapper. Joy.
Eventually we made it back to base. A little sun burnt, extraordinarily dirty and pretty well worn out, but full of good stories.
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