Hey Gannon family! My name is Emily ward and I am a current junior in the international management program with a minor in innovation and creativity. This is also my first ABST trip, and I have found it to be very enjoyable traveling with our group and the work we have begun doing for this community! I was very excited about this day as well because I was given the opportunity to post our day on the Gannonu instagram page to showcase our service.
In the morning we left campus at 9 a.m. to meet our partners from Beth-El to help prepare for the upcoming event of passing out food in the pantry. Today we helped to serve 522 families with food aide which was a very accomplishing number to learn. Getting the opportunity to help out that many families and more filled our group with joy.
We began our service day by organizing some last few tasks that needed done prior to passing out the pantry to patrons. We split into a few groups to complete them quicker and had some time left over for lunch and a quick few much needed naps before the pantry opened.
After that we received words from the pastor before beginning to pass food out to the patrons who had shown up for our service. A phrase I particularly was attached to went, “A warm smile is a universal expression of kindness” -William Arther Ward. This expression stuck out to me as I have a similar saying that goes “There is no reason not to smile, when you smile it makes others smile and that makes you smile too”.
We each received stations where we stood at and passed out each of our options to the patrons. Beth-El pantry is a “client-choice” pantry meaning that out of the options they are allowed to choose if they receive the items or not. We learned that many times multiple family’s will live in one home and often not have enough space for extra items and are forced to choose not to receive certain items that that may not consume.
As I was passing out the items on my pallets I had found that I quickly ran out of items. I had to restock a total of three times just to get through the day. It felt very accomplishing to even go through a single pallet of items let alone more than that.
After our day serving the community we headed back to campus and had only 15 minutes to get ready for our dinner with alumni. I’d say we cleaned up pretty well for them. After finally reaching the restaurant we got the chance to chat with Ruskin alum about their careers as well as their campus experiences that differed from our own up in Erie. We ate a very good dinner and enjoyed the company and conversations we had. But at the same time could not wait to get back to campus for the night.
Finally, around 10:30 p.m. we made our way back to campus to reflect on our service and the experiences we had through the day. Everyone talked about just how much this experience has affected them in such great ways and had the opportunity to reminisce all of the positivity we experienced within this community.
Some of us (Haki and I) had a little extra energy before bed that we needed to get out. I suggested that I teach everyone some line dances that I know and although I only had a couple of participants, and a few viewers, due to bedtime it was so much fun getting to share my line dance knowledge as I love it so much and spreading the joy that it brings. We danced and danced and danced until we got all of the “zoomies” out and truly felt the weight of the work we had done today. Luckily all of our energy was completely depleted and everyone got to sleep tight!
