Monday night and Tuesday morning

Monday afternoon we went to Virginia Avenue Church's JustLead program, an after school program where Americorps volunteers serve. We got to meet the children, help them make homemade pretzels, and played heads up seven up. It was interesting to get to see that part of town and meet the children of the Western Heights area of Knoxville.

Earlier in the day, one of the rental vans got a flat tire. It turned out to be a great experience for some of our buddies to experience how to fix this problem! Portia and Clay went with Jordan and Alice to Firestone, which is contracted with our Enterprise rental vans, and helped out. Portia tried coffee for the first time!

After volunteering with the children, we came back to the Emerald Youth Foundation's community center, our "home base" and got ready for dinner! One of the three dinner-cooking groups got it all ready and the rest of us hung out in the game room. The group, consisting of Portia, Sharmane, Will, Jordan, Alice, Jeanne, and many other helpers cooked a fabulous Italian meal. They made chicken parmesean, spaghetti, caesar salad, and homemade garlic bread!

After dinner, we had a great song session! We got out the Best Buddies song books and everyone sang along to songs we all knew! Country, campy, pop, etc. Everyone sang along, played on drums or guitars.

Then, we moved onto the Life Maps activity, an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) tradition that was brought to Best Buddies Spring Break (BSB). Life Maps is an activity in which each participant on the trip will have the opportunity to share his/her life story, speaking for as long as he/she wants and sharing anything he wants to. Our activity started off very emotional and then ended in uncontrollable laughter. We all bonded listening to some of our friends' life stories, and also had a great time with the activity as well.


Tuesday morning, we went back to Beardsley farm to work on our parking lot project! We began with playing a game around the fire, and then headed over to the parking lots at CAC. As you can see from the pictures, we uprooted many trees and bushes and cleared 3 plots completely ready for us to plant in! Josh worked on cutting down trees while Richie, Adrian, Alice, Clay, Jeannie, Honora, and Portia worked on uprooting grass. Jordan, Will, Christy, Travis, Chris, and I worked on getting bushes out of a plot with "loppers" and Emmie, Sharmane, and Ashley cleared a plot full of little plants to get ready to install our edible plants!

After a few good hours of working in the sun, we had a visit from Del Ray Zimmerman and his co-worker Malia! Del Ray is a coordinator of Volunteer Tennessee, the umbrella organization that organzes Americorps and other service endeavors in the state. He was a pivotal figure in the founding of this trip, and it was great to have him out on the site and meeting our buddies and helping out.
We had a great pizza lunch and some FABULOUS impromptu dance/song sessions. On the walk from Beardsley farm to our parking lot, the boys and girls sang back-and-forth Disney songs; in the parking lot after lunch, a huge dance session including Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, and Brittney Spears was going on. There is no stop to the fun here, no matter how cold it is outside or how tired everyone is from the day's work!

I have not stopped getting comments, every moment of the day, that include, "I'm really having such a great time," or "Please make sure I'm on the list for next year." Everyone is so grateful, as am I, for the fabulous activities and friendships on this trip. We look forward to an exciting afternoon today!