At the beginning of this internship I was super shy, but having to talk on the phone with people and getting up in front of crowds made me more outgoing. I believe doing those activities has made me a better leader and citizen. Before I even heard I had the opportunity to do this internship, I had been wanting to help better our community somehow. It took a lot of hard work and lots of planning to decide what we were going to start cleaning up first. We decided to clean up what most kids use, which is the basketball and tennis courts in an area next to the baseball field. We had so many ideas of what we wanted the courts to look like, but we knew we couldn’t do all of them, so we tried to pick the best idea so we could get to work. We started by filling the cracks in the cement for both courts. Then we painted all the fence poles and light poles. Since we were already painting we painted the frame for the bleachers and then painted the boards. After getting all the cleanup done, we saw how good it looked and were very impressed with what we had already accomplished. While working on project BTV, we put on a camp called DAMP camp, which stands for Drama Art Music and Photography. I taught photography. I taught kids how to take clear pictures of whatever they thought would look good. The camp went well and we had a decent amount of kids come through the whole week.
On days that there were City Council, School Board, or the Recreation Board meetings, someone would go to the meetings and tell them all about what we were doing and why we were doing the projects. We told them what Ogallala Commons is and why we were doing the internship through Ogallala Commons. All the people we talked to were impressed with what we were doing, especially when considering our age.
We recently did our harvesting ceremony and we had a really good turnout. We talked to our community about what we did and the steps it took in getting it done. For example, the planning and figuring out all of our schedules and then getting other people to help. This internship was definitely worth all the hard work. Doing this has helped me learn how to step up and be a leader. Not only have I had a lot of fun doing this but I feel that I have gained a lot of experience. It was such a great experience and I plan on doing it again next year.
