By; Vanessa Beltran
During my internship, I had to do 10 hours of community service. I completed these hours by doing the High Plains Food Distribution and helping clean and make food for our County Celebration and Rodeo. Our first food distribution was in July. Someone drove me and two other people from my county to help with the distribution. The distribution was in Quitaque at one of their big buildings. We got there at about 10:30 in the morning. We waited about one hour until the food truck got there. They would unload all of the crates of different food including vegetables, fruit, desserts, and fully cooked meals. We then would put them all in the building and get boxes that were empty and go around in a circle with each food at different tables. We would pick a couple of things out of every category like fruits, vegetables, bread, etc. We then would put the boxes in different piles for different towns. Silverton had the most boxes which felt great because that meant we would be helping a lot of people who needed the food.
We then would put all of our boxes on the trailer and would put more items on there too. We then drove back to Silverton and unloaded some of the things at our fire station and let the people who could come and get the food by themselves. We then drove around to different houses around town which were for the older citizens in our town and delivered the boxes straight to their door. This impacted me by seeing how many people really need the food. Our County Celebration and Rodeo was the busiest week of my whole internship. I worked more than 40 hours in that one week. I helped prepare everything for the rodeo including making the food, cleaning and washing donor signs, and cleaning the rodeo grounds.
Even though this was part of the job it was very tiring. Cleaning donor signs was very difficult because there was so much wind those two days and I was tired the whole week and the wind made it even more stressful! The whole week was very fun but very stressful! This was definitely the most challenging week of my internship. This impacted my community in a very positive way because everyone had a great time at our rodeo and they loved the food. We made good money with all the food that we sold. All of this community service impacted me in different ways to help people to clean a part of your town.
