My community service hours where split between the Memphis Community Garden and the High Plains Food Bank. At the Memphis Community Garden, I worked on getting the garden cleaned up to where the community members can get to it easier. Even though Silverton has its own Community Garden the Memphis Community Garden is a lot larger and the youth 4-H program is not as active. I know how the Silverton Community Garden has impacted my community and I wanted to make sure that some of the people from Memphis felt the same about their Community Garden. I would say that that working in the Garden had its challenge. For instance, I am not a good Gardener I think I have killed every plant I have ever owned. Another challenge for me personally is I am very pale complected and burn easily so sunscreen was a necessity. The outcome of this service was so beneficial to me. I learned how to properly garden and got to see how the people of the community felt when receiving the produce from the garden. The other community service project I did was the High Plains Food Bank Distribution Center for communities near me. For this service I helped unload all the pallets of food and organize them to then be packaged into boxes for the households who could not get out to buy food or does not have the income to. After we packaged all the boxes, we separated them for all the different communities and loaded them onto the trailers that their town representative brought. When we finished loading all the trailers, we had to take our boxes and goods back to Silverton for our Community Food Giveaway. When we got to Silverton, we unloaded all the produce and the other boxes at the Fire Department to be set up for the community to come and get. Then we delivered the pre-packaged boxes to the houses of community members who cannot go to the Fire Department to get them. I chose to do this as my community service hours because it is a big deal in my community, and I have volunteered in previous years because my grandmother helps with it. The biggest challenge for me might be kind of silly but I am not very strong and a lot of the boxes of food and produce where very heavy. I think that this experience had a great impact on me and really made me realize how much the people who put this on every month really do to benefit my community. It also really made me understand how import things like this are to small communities like mine. Another thing I got to experience was the joy the people receiving this food felt when we delivered it to them. One thing I have to say about my community service is that when I was trying to figure out what to do for it and how I was going to make it 300 words really worried me. However, after I experienced it and found that it really brought me joy to do such a great service to my community it was easy to write about. It had such a great impact on me that I will most definitely be volunteering for the Food Bank in the future.
