Monday

Ashley Schwanebeck
We started the day with creating our community guidelines as a group. I scribed and wrote our guild lines in a beautiful rainbow-array of colors. Some of our guidelines includes: be respectful, be present, take initiative, be cooperative, vegas rules, be accountable, ect. Next, we went through a Know, Want to know, Learned chart. Around 12:30 we went to World Relief and learned about their organization. We loaded furniture onto a truck and moved it all into a townhouse for an Iraqi refugee family of 6(the house had 3 bedrooms). I thought this was such an amazing experience. I didn't even get to meet the family I met, but I'm so glad I got to do something to help them out. Later in the day we watched square dancing by a group. It was their 41st anniversary, and watching them happily dance around was also a great experience. Overall, today was such a humbling day. I'm so lucky to have my own bedroom at home, not have to worry about acculturating to a new country, and go to college. I also saw you can be so contempt just dancing around with amazing friends. The square dancing group had been together 41 years. That is SO long, and they still are committed and have so much fun together. Today was such a great day!


Robdeti Geleta
Today, we officially started working with World Relief and honestly it could not have gone any better. A bunch of our members are well educated and well versed about the refugee and immigration issue that are currently happening in the US. However, during our morning session, we talked about issues we wanted to learn about and also what we already knew coming into the trip. So I really liked that we were able to go volunteering with an open mind but also an idea of how we wanted to engage with our NPO and the community that we were serving. I experienced so many highlights just on the first day and I am so excited to see what we have in store for the rest of the week. For instance, a few of my personal highlights included, organizing and moving furniture from the warehouse to a brand new apartment that was going to house an Iraqi family of 6. Also while we were moving the furniture inside a few children who were coming back from school and they stopped to speak to us and we ended up dancing and singing with them which was so amazing and sweet. My two last highlights included praying with a few missionaries from a university in Missouri and watching members of a square dancing team have their practice session at the church and it was awesome to watch a little bit of southern American culture since I haven't really had very much direct contact with square, line or round dancing. Overall, it was an amazing day in #theville with UMD alternative breaks.