What are you doing for others?

“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve."

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

(Like you didn’t see that coming..)

As you are all well aware, I am a proud member of AmeriCorps and I believe in the importance and strength that serving has for not only individuals, but for their communities, country, and ultimately the world as a whole. Now, I might be optimistic, but I genuinely feel like serving has a huge impact on a person. It impacts how they interact with other people, who they interact with, and how they interpret situations in the world. I certainly am not alone in this thinking and I certainly did not pioneer this thinking. As you can see from my quote above, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. too felt that serving your country can change a person and make them great in some way. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not only an advocate for service- as we all know. 

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. 

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that” 

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King taught an invaluable lesson about tolerance for others, about driving out hate, not with hate but with respect and dignity of others. When you give and you serve in your local community, you can see this change and this tolerance happening little by little. You cannot look at your community and think, “this place is a dump” and expect the next time you drive down that street for it to look any different if you do not do something about it. Of course, I realize that in the quote above, Dr. King was not explicitly talking about service- in fact, he was talking about tolerance of race, but for the purpose of keeping this post focused on service and on my experience this past MLK Day, I will not go down that road. From my experience over the past eight months living and serving in Sacramento, surrounded by many other people doing the same, reading Facebook status’ about their service in other states, I know the community can be changed with a positive and “work hard” attitude.

But, I am not writing tonight about the importance of service, nor am I writing about Dr. King’s life’s work because 1. We all know how I feel about service and 2. I think that everyone is aware of Dr. King and what he stood for. Instead, I wanted to highlight a few quotes in between telling you all what I did for my community this past MLK Day.

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?’”

–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This is my favorite sign in all of Sacramento

AmeriCorps members from coast to coast are urged to take part in a national day of service every MLK Day. They say “Make MLK Day a day on, not a day off.” And I genuinely think it’s a great philosophy. I reached out to a local VISTA member in the area to see if she knew of any events happening that I could join and sure enough, she did. I found out that I would be leading a group of volunteers at an elementary school in Folsom, CA doing some yard clean up and other tasks around the school. At 7:30am on Monday morning, myself and 4 other VISTAs arrived at our project site ready to work. As you all know, most of my job takes place behind a desk, working to build partnerships, so whenever I get the chance to get my hands dirty I am jumping with joy. There were five different tasks that we could pick between: painting a mural on the gardening shed, painting the ball wall, painting/ refreshing the painted lines outside of classrooms, organizing and sanitizing kindergarten classrooms, and creating a pathway using pavers outside of the kindergarten classrooms. Naturally, I chose the pathway.

It was a chilly morning in Folsom, about 45-50 degrees and overcast skies, but I was still ready to work. The team I was “leading” consisted of 2 ladies and 5 men, all who worked for Kaiser Permanente and who all had done a job just like this one for years past. Needless to say, they ended up leading me.

In order to install the walkway, we first had to dig a trench 2 feet wide by 4 inches deep. We moved a bunch of dirt from the trench to a nearby tree base using a wheelbarrow. This was very exciting for me. I honestly felt like a CCC corpsmember working hard out on the grade. It was awesome. To dig the trench out completely took us about 45 minutes. The walkway in total was going to be 37 feet long, but it had to turn at one point, so for our “engineers” (not me) it turned into a bit of a challenge. In the end we got the pathway mapped out and we continued working.

The ground before we had dug out all the dirt

After we finished digging out the right amount of dirt, accidentally hitting a few blocks of cement, and emptying the wheelbarrow a dozen times, it was time to tamp down the dirt so we could start laying the weed blocker, boards, and ultimately sand and pavers. I helped a few of the guys with the tamping until we had eventually leveled out the dirt as much as necessary. A few of the places we had dug needed to be filled in again, so we grabbed some of the dirt we had shoveled and tamped it back down. It was some tough work, considering the tamper itself weights about 20 pounds.

The ground after we tamped it down. Tamper tool is on the right

Now that we had made the dirt nice and even, we laid down some weed guard to make sure the weeds didn’t disturb the nice walkway we were going to put in. Then, we put some bender boards along the side of the trench that was not against concrete, so that the sand and the pavers we were installing stayed in place. We used wood stakes to hold the board in place and then drilled the stakes to the boards once we knew they were 2 feet apart. After the boards were set in place, we filled the trench in with sand. I lifted about 10 50lbs sandbags today. I know my shoulders are going to be sore. So, we filled the trench in with the sandbags and then we had to level the sand out and then we had to tamp it down again. This whole process took about another 2 hours. I am telling you, it was hard work!

The walkway when we finished!

Finally, it was time to lay down the pavers. We worked together as a team to keep the sand full, keep it pressed firmly down, lay down the pavers themselves, level them out, and then fill in the cracks with more sand. I was so impressed with how much work we were able to get down in such a short period of time. Unfortunately, I had to leave the project early (well, actually later than I was scheduled for, but earlier than it was finished) and didn’t get to see the full finished product, but I did get some pictures of the process.

Working with people in my community, seeing my hard work in front of me, and knowing that I was improving the lives of others- that is what I think volunteering is all about. This project might not have been a perfect representation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted from us, but I did do something for people other than myself, and that is something I think he would be proud of. Just remember: you can be great because you can serve and every day you have an opportunity to make yourself, your community, and this world a better place for everyone.